![]() Nor did Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood, whose officers conducted their own investigations. They had paper tickets to catch an early morning commuter flight from the Portland jetport to Boston Logan, where eight of their colleagues would be waiting at the gates to board two Boeing 767s, fully laden with the fuel needed to fly across the continent.īy the end of the week, numerous people would come forward claiming to have seen Atta and other hijackers in Portland earlier that summer or in the previous year. Make sure that nobody is following you.”Ītta and al-Omari may indeed have driven up from Boston that afternoon in an effort to obscure their tracks. ![]() “Check all of your items – your bag, your clothes, knives, your will, your IDs, your passport, all your papers. The time of judgment has arrived…from there you will begin to live the happy life, the infinite paradise,” Atta had written. “Purify your heart and clean it from all earthly matters. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer Twenty years ago, on September 10, terrorists Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari checked into the Comfort Inn, room 233, a hotel on the fringes of Portland’s airport. Their luggage included a videocassette for a Boeing 757 flight simulator, pepper spray, Atta’s will (drafted in 1996) and his handwritten instructions to his 18 fellow hijackers, copies of which were later found in a rental car and the wreckage of United Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Twenty years on, we still wonder why he and his henchman came to our quiet corner of the world to launch the terror.Ītta and al-Omari likely spent the next two hours in their room, leaving briefly to conduct an ATM transaction in the hotel’s lobby. But some Mainers also had the chilling experience of realizing they had hours before crossed paths with the lead hijacker as he began his mission. The events that shook the world, changed the course of history, and led to the invasions and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq shocked everyone old enough to remember them. The morning of the 11 th was a different story. On the night of the 10th, terrorists’ movements were largely recorded by machines – security cameras, credit card readers, cellphone towers and bank computers – the people they encountered having not taken much notice of two travelers running banal errands in a neighborhood sandwiched between highway off-ramps. The room had two queen beds with gold bedspreads, a floral print above each, sage green carpeting and a window looking out on the equally nondescript landscape of the Maine Mall area.Īnd so the September 11 th attacks began, 20 years ago, on a suburban commercial strip on the fringes of Portland’s airport. We will never stop following you.”Ītta entered the lobby and checked them both in, receiving the key for room 233, a second-floor double, at 5:43. “I am writing this in expectation of the end, which is near, an end that is really a beginning,” al-Omari said in a videotaped statement addressed to the United States and released a year later by Osama bin Laden. With him was Abdulaziz al-Omari, a 22-year-old Saudi of similar height and build with an easy smile and a small scar on his cheek. ![]() Housemates and coworkers would later describe him as disciplined, stoic, detail-oriented and intensely religious. Mohamed Atta was 37, wiry, 5-foot-7, an Egyptian trained as an engineer and urban planner with a piercing stare. It was a cloudy afternoon – off the coast a hurricane was working its way farther out to sea – but the forecast for the next morning, September 11, 2001, was for brilliant, clear skies. SOUTH PORTLAND - At half past five, a blue 2001 Nissan Altima pulled into the parking lot of the Comfort Inn on Maine Mall Road in South Portland.
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