Ziad Jarrah

Ziad Samir Jarrah (Arabic: زياد سمير جراح; 11 May 1975 – 11 September 2001) was a Lebanese aerospace engineer and terrorist hijacker for al-Qaeda. He was the hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as part of the September 11 attacks.

He was born in Beirut to a secular, wealthy and respected Arab family. He completed his early education at Lebanon's prestigious French-speaking Christian schools. In 1996, at the age of 21, he moved to Germany to pursue his university education. He continued his secular life, far removed from religious devotion, even in his early university years. While studying aerospace engineering at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, he met Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. Between 1997 and 1998, he began to grow closer to religion. He quit drinking alcohol and smoking, and began salah and reading the Quran. He was influenced by the verses on jihad in the Quran and believed that only martyrdom could erase the sins he had committed in the past.

Later, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an al-Qaeda communications officer, met these three university students and founded the group known as the Hamburg cell with them. In 1999, bin al-Shibh took him and his two other school friends, Atta and al-Shehhi, to Afghanistan to meet Osama bin Laden. In June 2000, he flew to New Jersey, United States. Shortly thereafter, he moved from New Jersey to Venice, Florida and trained with flight instructors Rudi Dekkers at Huffman Aviation alongside Atta and al-Shehhi until January 2001. On 7 September 2001, he arrived in Newark, New Jersey from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Four days later, he boarded United Airlines Flight 93 and hijacked the plane along with Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Haznawi, and Ahmed al-Nami.

They attempted to crash the plane into the United States Capitol Building or the White House. However, Jarrah, who noticed that the passengers had become aware of the other three attacks and were trying to force open the cockpit door, rocked the plane several times from side to side to throw them off balance and consulted with his accomplices. It was 9:45 a.m., and when Jarrah realized they would not achieve their goals, he whispered the Shahada: "There is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." He did not surrender control to the passengers and crashed the plane into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, at around 10:03 a.m. Seconds before the plane crashed, Jarrah's last words, "Allahu Akbar" (repeated many times), were recorded on the CVR.

According to the 9/11 Commission Report and Aysel Şengün's (his girlfriend) statements to German police, Jarrah spoke at least four languages at a high level: Arabic, French, German, and English.

Ziad Samir Jarrah was born on 11 May 1975, in Beirut, Lebanon, into a wealthy and respected Arab family. His father, Samir Jarrah, was a social service inspector employed by the Lebanese government, while his mother worked as an elementary school teacher. Although nominally Sunni Muslim, his parents maintained a secular lifestyle. In Lebanon, he received primary and secondary education at prestigious French-speaking Christian institutions favored by the country's elite.

From an early age, Jarrah expressed a strong interest in aviation, but his family opposed this ambition. As his father later recounted to The Wall Street Journal one week after the attacks: "I stopped him from being a pilot. I only have one son and I was afraid that he would crash." According to Mahmood Ali, a sports club operator in Düsseldorf who last spoke with Jarrah by phone in July 2001, Jarrah's family was the most influential family in Marj, Lebanon. His uncle Jamal Jarrah (b. 1956) was a wealthy banker at the time; he was a member of the Lebanese parliament from 2005–2018, and is currently a member of the political party Future Movement. In addition, the father of his cousin Salim Ghazi Jarrah was a high-ranking official in the Lebanese government.

Between 1995 and 1996, while Jarrah resided in Lebanon, an individual bearing the same name reportedly rented an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. The landlords identified the tenant as matching the photographs later released by the FBI. In spring 1996, Jarrah relocated to Germany with his cousin Salim Ghazi Jarrah to enroll in a German-language certificate program at the University of Greifswald—a prerequisite for non-native speakers pursuing higher education in the country. During this period, while sharing an apartment with his cousin, Jarrah frequently attended discos and beach parties, and his mosque attendance diminished. Alcohol and cigarettes were part of his life. He formed a close friendship with Aysel Şengün, a German citizen of Turkish descent studying dentistry. The two maintained an intermittent romantic relationship for the rest of his life and briefly cohabited, a circumstance that displeased his more religiously observant acquaintances.