Hijacking suspect just a good, kind boy, says stricken father

By ROBERT FISK

ALMARJ - When Ziad Jarrah boarded United Airlines flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, was he planning to holiday in California or to destroy the White House?

The United States says the latter. His family beg visitors and friends to believe in his innocence.

His father, Samir, sat beside me yesterday and opened his palms in that gesture of innocence which is also a form of special pleading.

"He called just two days before the plane crashed to tell me he'd received the $US2000 I'd sent him," Samir Jarrah said. Still recovering from open-heart surgery, he slumped, sick and traumatised, in a green plastic chair beneath the vines of his garden.

"Ziad said it was for his aeronautical course. He had told me last year that he had a choice of courses - in France or in America - and it was me who told him to go to the States.

"But there are lots of Ziads. Maybe it wasn't him? He was a good, kind boy ... " At which point Samir Jarrah brought his hands to his face and broke down in tears.

Around us, a clutch of middle-aged men sat on identical chairs beneath the vines, most of them members of the extended Jarrah family, all Sunni Muslims, all appalled that a crime against humanity should stain this tiny but wealthy village in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

A massive new village mosque - I've never seen so big a mosque in so small a town - stood scarcely 200 metres from the front door, but both friends of the family and Ziad Jarrah's uncle insisted that he was neither religious nor political.

"He was a normal person," Jamal Harrah said. "He drank alcohol, he had girlfriends. Only last August, his Turkish girlfriend Asle came to meet our family here because she wanted to meet her future in-laws.

"He wasn't able to come with her because he said he was too busy with his studies."

Too busy to bring his fiancee to meet his family? Busy doing what? And what was the $US2000 for? To continue studies at his Miami aeronautical school? Or to buy tickets for the Boeing 757 flight to California?

It was Ziad Jarrah's flight which plunged to the ground in Pennsylvania, its passengers apparently wrestling with the hijackers, perhaps with Ziad as he gripped the controls.

Asle was in Germany, freely giving evidence to the Bochum city police who had just searched her apartment, discovering "aircraft-related documents" in a suitcase belonging to one of three men named by Washington as hijackers.

All of them - something the Jarrah family could not explain and would not believe - lived together in Hamburg.

Ziad's guilt seemed even more certain when it was revealed that one of his fellow students was Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born pilot who crashed American Airlines flight AA11 into the World Trade Center.

- INDEPENDENT

Full coverage: Terror in America

Pictures: Day 1 | Day 2

Brooklyn Bridge live webcam

Video

The fatal flights

Emergency telephone numbers for friends and family of victims and survivors

United Airlines: 0168 1800 932 8555

American Airlines: 0168 1800 245 0999

NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade: 0800 872 111

US Embassy in Wellington (recorded info): 04 472 2068

Victims and survivors

Air New Zealand announcements

Air NZ flight information: 0800 737 000