Khalid Al Mihdhar Still Alive
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The story...

Khalid Al Mihdhar is still alive, according to media reports.

Our take...

Some reports do suggest this as a possibility, but they fall far short of proof. Let's look at a few examples.

And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm

Nope, that's really all there is. Convincing? No.

The confusion has added to the problems of investigators. They have discovered that one of the men arrested, Badr Mohammed Hamzi, a radiologist from San Antonio, Texas, regularly used the name Khalid Al-Midhar, who has been named as another of the hijackers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,601550,00.html

And using the same name proves he's the same person? No, not even close.

Another common reference is to an FDIC document.

Eight days after the planes went down, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. distributed a "special alert" to its member banks asking for information about 21 "alleged suspects" in the attacks. The list said "Al-Midhar, Khalid Alive," raising the possibility that the real Almihdhar never died on the plane. But one Justice Department official called the listing a "typo."
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2001/coxnews102101.html

A smoking gun? Well, the document only lists Al-Midhar as alive (read it here). So if you believe several of the hijackers are still around, then you must choose to believe that the Al-Midhar reference is accurate, while all the others are false. Sounds a little selective to us.

The closest these stories get to suggesting a Government error is here:

JEDDAH, 27 September - Khalid Al-Mihammadi, a Saudi youth from Makkah who works as a computer programmer, has talked about receiving the shock of his life when he saw that his picture was among the suspects who had hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon in Washington on Sept. 11.

He said the FBI might have got his picture from the US federal office that issues ID cards to expatriates. Mihammadi was in the United States for nine months to learn English, but returned to the Kingdom earlier this year.

Speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat, Mihammadi, 22, disclosed that he had studied at two English language institutes in Indiana and Florida. He affirmed that he has no connection at all with aviation. "I have not received any aviation training and I have never dreamt of becoming a pilot," he said.

Mihammadi is a computer programmer by profession and attended an advanced computer course at the Institute of Public Administration in Jeddah.

The FBI identified the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 as Majed Moqaad, Khalid Al-Mehdar (also identified as Khalid Almihammadi), Nawaf Al-Hazmi, Salim Al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, who allegedly piloted the plane. The FBI first released a different picture of Mehdar. Later it published the picture of Mihammadi.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=9295&d=27&m=9&y=2001

They don’t show us a picture of Khalid Al-Mihammadi, unfortunately, or confirm the picture he saw that was supposedly of him, or say where he saw it. However, even this story says in its final two sentences that the FBI released one picture of Midhar (Mehdar here), another of Mihammadi, therefore they’re not saying the named hijacker is still alive, just that one picture was incorrect.

Further confirmation that this was just a mixup occured later, when the Saudi Government appear to have accepted that the 15 Saudi citizens (including Al-Midhar) named by the US were involved.

Saudi Arabia acknowledged for the first time that 15 of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers were Saudi citizens...
 
Previously, Saudi Arabia had said the citizenship of 15 of the 19 hijackers was in doubt despite U.S. insistence they were Saudis. But Interior Minister Prince Nayef told The Associated Press that Saudi leaders were shocked to learn 15 of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

"The names that we got confirmed that," Nayef said in an interview. "Their families have been notified."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002/02/06/saudi.htm

We could construct a long list of maybes: maybe a conspirator actually revealed the truth about Midhar, maybe he didn’t reveal the truth about the others who are still alive, maybe Al-Midhar’s not come forward because he’s scared, maybe Saudi Arabia were pressured into making that statement, or did it for political reasons of their own. But there’s not actually any evidence for any of that, and until someone produces some perhaps the simpler explanation is that Al-Midhar isn’t alive at all.
 

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