Majed Moqed

Majed Moqed (Arabic: ماجد موقد, romanized: Mājad Mūqad; 18 June 1977 – 11 September 2001) was a Saudi terrorist hijacker affiliated with al-Qaeda. He hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and was one of the five hijackers who crashed the Boeing 757 into the Pentagon as part of the September 11 attacks.

Moqed studied law at a college in Saudi Arabia before joining al-Qaeda in 1999. He was personally selected by Ramzi bin al-Shibh to participate in the 9/11 attacks. Al-Shibh sent him to the United States in May 2001 to study how to carry out the attacks.

Moqed was a law student from the small town of Al-Nakhil, Saudi Arabia (west of Medina), studying at King Fahd University's Faculty of Administration and Economics. Before he dropped out, he was apparently recruited into al-Qaeda in 1999 along with friend Satam al-Suqami, a hijacker of American Airlines Flight 11, with whom he had earlier shared a college room.^{[failed verification]}

The two trained at Khalden, a large training facility near Kabul that was run by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. A friend in Saudi Arabia claimed he was last seen there in 2000, before leaving to study English in the United States. In November 2000, Moqed and al-Suqami flew into Iran from Bahrain together.^{[citation needed]}

Some time late in 2000, Moqed traveled to the United Arab Emirates, where he purchased traveler's cheques presumed to have been paid for by 9/11 financier Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. Five other hijackers also passed through the UAE and purchased travellers cheques,^{[citation needed]} including Wail al-Shehri, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Hamza al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Haznawi, and Ahmed al-Nami.

Known as al-Ahlaf during the preparations, Moqed then moved in with hijackers Salem al-Hazmi, Abdulaziz al-Omari, and Khalid al-Mihdhar in an apartment in Paterson, New Jersey.^{[citation needed]}

Moqed first arrived to the United States on or about May 2, 2001 with Ahmed al-Ghamdi.

Later that year, Moqed, Hani Hanjour, al-Hazmi, and Ahmed al-Ghamdi rented a minivan and travelled to Fairfield, Connecticut. There they met a contact in the parking lot of a local convenience store who provided them with false IDs. (This was possibly Eyad Alrababah, a Jordanian charged with document fraud).^{[citation needed]}