The FBI named a Saeed al-Ghamdi as one of the 9/11 hijackers in their first full list, on September 14th. However questions were soon raised over this identification. There was a hint from the BBC:
The Telegraph added more details in a report published on the 23rd of September:
This seems to be a substantial claim, in that “name, place, date of birth and occupation” are all claimed to match. Of course a report of someone saying this doesn’t make it true, and there’s at least one reason to doubt the claim: the 14th September FBI hijackers list entry for Al-Ghamdi.
Even by the 27th FBI list, with photographs (and after the "still alive" Al Ghamdi came forward) this had only expanded to:
But note there's no mention of nationality (unlike others on the list), when or where he was born, or his occupation. If these were published by the US authorities prior to the 23rd, then why aren’t they included here? If he read details that came from some other source, then we don’t know that they were correct. The idea that his details matched those of the hijacker isn’t in any way substantiated here.
Another complication is that this Alghamdi says he’s been based in Tunis for the last 10 months. During this period the Alghamdi referred to by the FBI had been leaving a paper trail for the US, including a driving licence application that was taken on the 10th of July, 2001 (http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/MM01005.pdf) -- another indication that we’re talking about two different people. There’s confirmation within the Telegraph story in the talk of the FBI Alghamdi photograph, which the “still alive” Alghamdi says is of “somebody else”.
A later story in the Boston Globe certainly seems to have no problem linking Alghamdi to the other hijackers, and suggesting they were all involved:
Of course the lack of a source for these claims makes it weak as evidence, and perhaps you don’t trust the US media on these issues, anyway. In which case, how about Germany’s Der Spiegel? They investigated the Alghamdi “still alive” claims, and reported they were nothing more than mistaken identity. This is the relevant section.
Take the BBC, for example, which did in fact report, on September 23, 2001, that some of the alleged terrorists were alive and healthy and had protested their being named as assassins.
But there is one wrinkle. The BBC journalist responsible for the story only recalls this supposed sensation after having been told the date on which the story aired. "No, we did not have any videotape or photographs of the individuals in question at that time," he says, and tells us that the report was based on articles in Arab newspapers, such as the Arab News, an English-language Saudi newspaper.
The operator at the call center has the number for the Arab News on speed dial. We make a call to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A few seconds later, Managing Editor John Bradley is on the line. When we tell Bradley our story, he snorts and says: "That's ridiculous! People here stopped talking about that a long time ago."
Bradley tells us that at the time his reporters did not speak directly with the so-called "survivors," but instead combined reports from other Arab papers. These reports, says Bradley, appeared at a time when the only public information about the attackers was a list of names that had been published by the FBI on September 14th. The FBI did not release photographs until four days after the cited reports, on September 27th.
The photographs quickly resolved the nonsense about surviving terrorists. According to Bradley, "all of this is attributable to the chaos that prevailed during the first few days following the attack. What we're dealing with are coincidentally identical names." In Saudi Arabia, says Bradley, the names of two of the allegedly surviving attackers, Said al-Ghamdi and Walid al-Shari, are "as common as John Smith in the United States or Great Britain."
The final explanation is provided by the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, one of the sources of Arab News, which in turn serves as a source to the BBC. Mohammed Samman is the name of the reporter who interviewed a man named Said al-Ghamdi in Tunis, only to find that al-Ghamdi was quite horrified to discover his name on the FBI list of assassins.
Samman remembers his big story well. "That was a wonderful story," he says. And that's all it was. It had nothing to do with the version made up of Bröckers' and Bülow's combined fantasies.
"The problem," says Samman, "was that after the first FBI list had been published, CNN released a photo of the pilot Said al-Ghamdi that had been obtained from the files of those Saudi pilots who had at some point received official flight training in the United States."
After Samman's story was reported by the news agencies, he was contacted by CNN. "I gave them Ghamdi's telephone number. The CNN people talked to the pilot and apologized profusely. The whole thing was quite obviously a mix-up. The Ghamdi family is one of the largest families in Saudi Arabia, and there are thousands of men named Said al-Ghamdi."
When we ask Samman to take another look at the FBI's list of photographs, he is more than happy to oblige, and tells us: "The Ghamdi on the photo is not the pilot with whom I spoke."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,265160-2,00.html
The CNN clip (1.5 MB, XviD AVI) confirms that their picture was not of the alleged hijacker. A German 9/11 site does the same with better resolution images:
The pilot al-Ghamdi on CNN
The pilot al-Ghamdi on CNN
The pilot and hijacker al-Ghamdis
If anyone needed further confirmation that this al-Ghamdi is a different individual to the alleged hijacker, then, it arrived in 2002, when Saudi Arabia finally accepted that the named suspects were actually involved.
And later that same year when Al Jazeera played an al-Qaeda tape showing al-Ghamdi, who described America as "the enemy" and spoke of the importance of jihad:
The final piece of evidence appeared in an FBI document released by NARA as a part of the 9/11 Commission files. It revealed that a latent fingerprint taken from al-Ghamdi's visa application matched a portion of the Flight 93 remains: