Reply #20: Atta and Lufthansa

[John Doe II]

I found only one article about that but it is based in fact on the German book. Here you go:

Seven months before he hijacked a U.S. jetliner and flew it into the World Trade Center, Mohamed Atta and two associates tried to get jobs with Lufthansa Airlines that would have granted them access to secure areas of the busy international airport in Frankfurt, Germany, according to a new book.

The 33-year-old Egyptian national applied for a job with Lufthansa on Feb. 15, 2001, according to "Netzwerke des Terrors (Networks of Terror)," a book published last month by Juergen Roth, one of Germany's top investigative reporters.

By the time he sought work in Frankfurt, Atta had already been to the United States and attended flight training school in Florida. Weeks later he would move out of the apartment he shared with fellow suspected terrorists in Hamburg, Germany.

Atta did not know that Lufthansa's personnel division had access to law enforcement files that indicated he had once been under investigation for petty drug crimes and falsifying phone cards while a student at the Technical University at Hamburg-Harburg in 1995, the book reports, citing federal law enforcement sources.

Atta didn't get the job. Neither did an Iranian citizen who dropped Atta's name while applying for the job three days later, not realizing an internal decision had already been made rejecting Atta. Nor did a third applicant who showed up on March 5, 2001, with Atta at his side. The three, according to the book, were members of an Islamic study group at the university in Hamburg. One of the two told Lufthansa's personnel division that he had been a pilot in the Pakistani air force, according to the book.

Lufthansa's U.S. spokesman Tom Tripp yesterday said he couldn't confirm or deny the report.

(Newsday, 1/24/02)