"Disappearing News": The Second Mohamed in Venice

A mysterious French-Arab man resurfaced last week who authorities had dubbed the ‘5th terrorist pilot’ and a ‘Second’ Mohamed in Venice, FL. In an email, he alleged that a number of eyewitnesses, including the girl who had lived with him, had all mistaken him... for Mohamed Atta.

It was he they'd known in Venice, not the terrorist ringleader, he asserted. And he suggested the confusion might owe something to their common name, "Mohamed."

Before dismissing the claims of this supposed "Second Mohamed," we must first consider a curious story from the Sarasota Herald Tribune, which seems to back him up.

It was while reviewing his allegations that we discovered that crucial early news reports filed in Venice during the week after the attack in the local Sarasota Herald Tribune have been removed from the newspaper database Lexis-Nexis, relied on by journalists and investigators worldwide.

Read the full article of Daniel Hopsicker here:
http://www.madcowprod.com/05022005.html

Hopsicker has been inconsistent and even supportive of the official story (he's attacked me and a lot of people for arguing foreknowledge) but any time he goes back to Atta & Co's movements in Florida he comes up with great stuff.

Hope everyone reads this one and saves the news-story links.

Check out some recent MadCow stories by an author I haven't seen before, Grant Noah:

9/11 CONSPIRATORS MET WITH BUSH OFFICIALS AFTER ATTACKS
http://www.madcowprod.com/10292004issue.html

BUSH OFFICIALS TO "REACH OUT" TO MUSLIM BROS.
http://www.madcowprod.com/11052004issue.html

BUSH ALLY IN WOT MET BIN LADIN
http://www.madcowprod.com/11122004issue.html

Lots of new stuff. Digesting...

Weird about the articles being deleted-- who would do that?

Looks like I need to study this more carefully.

That I've searched for these on Lexis Nexus and most of them are gone, yet one knows they exist because other articles days later in the same newspaper make reference to them.

I've seen this happen with other controversial articles. It happens on Google, too. For instance, try searching for the abu ghraib torture images at images.google.com - you won't find them.

He deserves credit for his tireless field investigations. Thanks to him, we know a lot about the extent to which there has been a cover-up of what these people were doing in the US and what sort of connections they had. Whether one concludes that they were patsies or the actual hjackers - and Hopsicker is convinced of the latter - it is evident that the full story about them hasn't been told by a long shot.

to dispell the story that Mohamed Atta was a drug-using party animal and not a devout muslim. Not only this "Mohamed Arajaki" is in on it, but also people who can control what is in the Lexis-Nexis database.

Creepy.

But if the pictures in the article are really supposed to be of this Mohamed Arajaki, then clearly this whole thing is absurd, cause he doesn't look anything like Atta.

But unfortunately this does muddy the waters quite a bit, and anyone who hasn't been following this story from the beginning is bound to be very confused.

One thing on a related point, that bothered me about Hopsicker, is at one point on his website, he had a picture of Amanda Keller that was clearly doctored to make it seem as if she was sitting with Atta. But the picture wasn't labeled as a phony, and this turned me off from Hopsicker for a while. Moreover, while he has done really nice work, Hopsicker seems remarkably oblivious to the larger picture of 9/11 and the implications of his research.

After reading Hopsicker's piece, I'm actually wondering if the FBI was right all along, and Keller wasn't Atta's girlfriend, but was the girlfriend of this Mohamed Arajaki who is twice pictured in Hopsicker's latest missive.

The reason I wonder this is because one of the articles linked, which states:

An FDLE agent working in conjunction with the FBI arrived at the LaConca home around 10:30 a.m. Thursday and questioned the couple for two hours concerning a man they knew only as "Mohamed."

The couple told the agent the man was about 25, 5 feet 10 inches, 160 pounds, had "dark, perfect" skin, and was clean cut and "very polite."

"He was a very handsome guy," Vonnie LaConca said in an interview. "He had beautiful, unblemished skin."

Mohamed was associated with a local woman believed to be Amanda Keller, a local restaurant manager, LaConca said. The FBI is looking for Keller for additional questioning, but she might be missing.

http://www.madcowprod.com/keller.htm

---

From the same article, the woman makes clear this person was NOT Atta:

The couple said the FDLE agent showed them four photographs of possible suspects in the terrorist attack.

"The first photo they showed us was the pilot who crashed into the first building," Vonnie LaConca said. "It was not Mohamed or his friend. But the last picture they showed us was very close, but I could not say 100 percent that it was him."

---

"The pilot who crashed into the first building" is Atta. So she looked at that picture and determined he wasn't the guy.

That's from 9/14/01, the very first article to mention Keller. The description matches Arajaki to a "T" and doesn't match Atta at all. As a straight male, I have to say this Arajaki could definitely be described as "a very handsome guy" while Atta most definitely could not. The height, the age (Atta was 33 at the time), the skin (in Atta's famous photo it is most definitely blemished), it all seems to match Arajaki better, judging from the photos.

But on the other hand, there are a number of other people who seem convinced it was Atta, and they don't look that similar at all. So I'm confused.

Could Keller herself have been confused? At one point in Hopsicker's book she says the FBI nearly convinced her that she was talking about the wrong person. And a week after the above article came out, she told the press:

"Keller said comments attributed to her in the Herald-Tribune on Saturday, saying that Atta lived in her apartment, were wrong. She said that it was this unidentified fifth man, also named Mohammed, that stayed in her home."

So she's waffled on this.

Regardless, I still think there are many unexplained things about Atta's movements in Florida, and a cover up about it. Keller's story ultimately is only a small piece of the puzzle, and her encounters cover his actions for just a couple of months in early 2001. So the larger puzzles would still remain, even if these early 2001 citings were of this Arajaki guy.

Furthermore, if she was actually with Arajaki, he's got major issues. Maybe he was confused for Atta not so much for looks as for personality, as he seemed equally mysterious, creepy, and even psychopathic (Keller has a story of him, whoever he was, grusomely killing her cat).

The Mohammed that lived with Amanda went to the same flight school as Mohammed Atta! He had several flying licenses from several countries. He had been training in what she described as a "militia". Besides, why would Amanda be warned by the FBI and go into hiding if she hadn't known Mohammed Atta?

All of the above rests on the assumption that Amanda is telling the truth, of course. But why would she lie? She was clearly not seeking fame and fortune. Hopsicker had to track her down and convince her to do the interview. She didn't get any money for it, according to Hopsicker.

his skin isn't dark and he is decent looking but not very handsome and I can't see how clear his complexion is.

I just don't understand how anyone could confuse that guy with the mean looking Atta we all know.

But having read "Welcome to Terrorland" I also have doubts about Keller. Many of her stories about "Atta" were just too over the top. I almost have to wonder if Keller, this other Mohamed and Mohamed Atta were all just actors in some very weird play.

hi,
i consider this issue important enough to directly respond, which is something anyone should be rightly loathe to do...
But this is not a case of "experts disagree." so let me relieve you of your "confusion." its simple:

the second atta story is ridiculous on its face.
the man in the picture cannot reasonably be mistaken with atta.
the man in the picture appears clearly over six feet tall. but atta WAS 5'10, as described. and atta WAS handsome. he didn't conjure his haughty narcissistic look out of thin air.)

anyone can tell from a glance that the two men bear little resemblance. nobody who saw one of them on a daily basis for MONTHS would mistake one for the other.

frankly, i don't believe anyone COULD confuse atta's instantly-recognizable and permanently-grim visage for someone else.

and that's WITHOUT factoring in the eyewitness testimony of a half-dozen people.

also: keller didn't "waffle." waffling is "well maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. keller "recanted." under FBI duress. the same duress complained of by at least three other individuals, each of whom VOLUNTEERED it almost as soon as i walked through the door.
actually they burst out with it. these people were pissed off and they wanted to talk about it. and they did.

each of them exemplifies the refusal to be intimidated by authority that is one of the best qualities of americans.

housewife stephanie frederickson, atta and amanda's next door neighbor, had no agenda. she had no pre-existing beef with the FBI. during the day she cares for an infant granddaughter.
her husband is a maytag repairman. it doesn't get any more ordinary than that.

if you mean to suggest that these people--including her husband, the postman,the apartment manager, his wife--are all MISTAKEN in identifying Atta as the person they saw come in and out and go up and down the stairs on a daily basis for MONTHS... please state your reasons.

otherwise please refrain from dis-respecting them and their testimony.

daniel hopsicker

So-- do you still think that Atta flew the plane himself? In your book, you had a mention of remote-controlled planes but you never said anything else about it...

when a suicide bomber blows him/herself up in the middle east every fifteen minutes nobody wonders if they've been duped into strapping explosives across their chest.

what i heard about atta in venice is, he wasn't right for the job--he was perfect for it.

if all you need is a warm body with an arab surname along for the ride,it doesn't seem you need someone whose been conditioned to the point where dismembering kittens is a breeze,does it.

:)

which I believe in, dating back to Bojinka, is not inconsistent with additional facilitation by those within the government who wanted a 9/11.

Atta may have been the perfect suicide pilot... but the official conspiracy theory (at any rate, the idea the attacks were pulled off by his crew of 19 without facilitation from within the USG) still does not explain the events before, after, and especially on 9/11.

Or, to start a different way: Was Hani Hanjour perfect?

to some extent. They often are "conditioned" before they go do they dirty work. Just like Atta may have been conditioned to be a psychopath.

The big question for me though, is could Atta really fly the plane? If he was a real pilot, then I guess he could. He certainly acted like a pilot, according to your book. But if he was trained already, why did he go to flight school? Just to plant the "legend"?

And Hani Hanjour, the one at the flight school, simply could not have flown the plane into the Pentagon. But there may have been a switch-- the boarding video shows someone different. The other 9/11 "pilots" also seem to lack sufficient training for what they were supposed to have done-- assuming:
1) the flight school lessons weren't all an act
2) the people who took flight lessons really were the ones who got on he planes

The bottom line to me is that we simply don't know who the hijackers were that were on the planes.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I agree the weight of witness evidence is in favor of the Mohamed here being Atta. But I'm still troubled by the LaConca account. You have two witnesses who very clearly state the Mohamed they knew associating with Keller was not the famous Mohamed Atta. In the end of the article they describe being shown pictures of Atta and Alshehhi (whom they call the pilot of the first plane and his friend), and say they didn't recognize either of them.

You're very good at tracking people down. In your book you tried and didn't manage to track this couple down, but maybe you could make another effort and eliminate this confusion. Just a thought.

Also, some of the other accounts seem confusing. For instance, Postal carrier Neil Patton says Atta lived in the Sandpiper apartments with five other men, including Al-Shehhi, and lived there until about the beginning of January 2001, when all of them moved out. That sounds different from Keller's account, where she meets him around March and lives with him there from April to May of 2001. Another article ("Flight school may have charged suspected terrorists extra rent") also states, "It is unknown how long the six men resided at Sandpiper Apartments before leaving in early January of this year."

Could it be Atta was at the Sandpiper apartments, but at a different time than Keller says he was? I don't know. I'm just trying to make sense of all of this, and I see some contradictory witness accounts. We also have things like Charles Grapentine clearly stating he saw Atta in April at that apartment for three weeks with Keller, which strongly backs up Keller's account.

I agree that Mohamed Atta seems to be an extremely distinctive looking person and this Mohammed Arajaki has a very different appearance. But I remain puzzled by the LaConca account in particular. Their account needs to be respected as much as the others, and explained somehow. For instance, perhaps they did identify him as Atta, since they said they were fairly sure about a match of one of the photos the FBI showed them, and they were just confused about which one of the photos was Atta's. Since you're on the ground over there, hopefully you can sort it all out.

Keep up the good work.

im happy to clarify matters:

atta lived in a rental house of the laconcas for only one week.
and met the laconcas only once, when renting. he was so unpleasant that to avoid having to see him in person in future vonnie laconca told him to put future rent in the freezer, and she would pick it up when he wasn't around.

they only saw him once. not every day for two months.

the article you reference is a perfect example of the beginning of the coverup. it calls him "mohamed." no last name, but its CLEAR who they're talking about. if it isn't atta, its not a story.

When authorities told Amanda Keller at her mothers house that they weren't allowed to burn leaves because of fears they might burn documents while they were under surveillance, it wasn't because she knew someone named arajaki, which BTW, was a name atta used as an alias.


before that he lived in a house in nearby deep creek, which amanda described helping him move out of to the laconcas.

local news accounts ALSO stated atta had lived in deep creek, correlating precisely with amanda's account.

(actually the deep creek residence is a whole mystery unto itself. seven people, inc atta, each paid 300 a week. that's $8000 a month, in an areas where you can get a minimansion for 2500 a month. hmm.)

again: amanda helped atta move into the laconcas for a week, before they moved together to venice for two months.

in venice, atta and amanda were not alone at the sandpiper. marwan and six other men were in an apartment downstairs. atta was seen with them often.

i hope that clears things up. now, here's some REAL mystery:

at the laconcas atta and amanda met linda. linda told the newspapers she worked for the laconcas at a dry cleaning facility they owned. amanda says linda told HER she was a stripper in sarasota.

just one week before the attack, Atta phoned linda. what did they talk about?

find linda, and another tiny piece of the mosaic of the TRUE story of the 9.11 conspiracy will come into focus.

finally, i went to the laconca residence. met vonnie. she was such a lowlife scumbag that i got suspicious about whether her renting to atta might have some larger significance, like maybe she rented out safehouses to other scumbags.

but amanda said no, he called an ad out of the paper. if thats true, then atta met linda the stripper by accident (a second stripper, if you count amanda) and took her to key west along with amanda and his german buddies, and then stayed in touch with her right up until the attack.

something about that doesn't feel quite right. at the very least,
there is much more to be learned about this.

but the REAL mystery is this: why am i STILL the only one down here?

And to think that I was getting ready to write this board off!!

Some of us are EXTREMELY PLEASED to see you here, danhop.
Love your work.
And I have long wondered about the Atta-Bukhari/Portland switch
and how the photos remained the same,
despite the change in stated identity.

Dan Hopsicker--just sat this morning catching up on your web and thought of you last night when I listened to Terry McDermott from the LA Times give an interview about his book about the hijackers. He talked at the end about all of the relatives of the hijackers being "In denial." "They believe in the omnipotence of the Moussad and the CIA and claim the trade towers attack couldn't have happened without the assistance of these two organizations (!)"

Have you ever talked to any family members--and do we really know just who was on those planes? I hear many still listed as conspirators are at home safe in their bed.

where would you post if you left here?

and probably the Mossad was in on it.

And you're absolutely right-- we just don't know who was really on the planes!

on CNN if he thought the arrest of "al-Qaeda's number three man" would change anything. He at least had the good common sense to say that it didn't mean all that much, but he didn't question the assumption that this guy was "al-Qaeda" - while it took about half an hour before a DU'er clarified that this was a misunderstanding. The arrested man is NOT the Libyan that has been called al-Qaeda's number three man, but a Pakistani with a similar-sounding name.

Some terrorism expert, this McDermott.

Of course, that was hardly a misunderstanding on the part of the "authorities" that announced the arrest.

Referring to the al-Qaeda number three man being someone else, that is.

Thanks.

(How could he NOT be Al Qaeda? He looked so creepy! </sarcasm> )

I'm beginning to doubt what I just wrote, because I keep reading at sites that I find highly credible (like Asia Times Online) that he was indeed this Libyan. But someone posted a convincing post on DU yesterday with plenty of links that seemed to show that this was not the case, I thought I had saved it but I can't find it. So maybe I shouldn't be so certain about it.

Anyway, I saw an interview yesterday on CNN with a Pakistani official who said that the arrested individual would probably not be able to give much information about foreign terrorists like Bin Laden, because he wouldn't know much about their doings or whereabouts. Which doesn't sound much like al-Qaeda's number three man to me.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.

by the way, who is your avatar? Is that Newton perhaps?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1602568,00.html

"Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of ‘mistaken identity’
Christina Lamb and Mohammad Shehzad Islamabad
THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as “a critical victory in the war on terror”. According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists’ third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as “among the flotsam and jetsam” of the organisation.

Al-Libbi’s arrest in Pakistan, announced last Wednesday, was described in the United States as “a major breakthrough” in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Bush called him a “top general” and “a major facilitator and chief planner for the Al- Qaeda network”. Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, said he was “a very important figure”. Yet the backslapping in Washington and Islamabad has astonished European terrorism experts, who point out that the Libyan was neither on the FBI’s most wanted list, nor on that of the State Department “rewards for justice” programme.

Another Libyan is on the FBI list — Anas al-Liby, who is wanted over the 1998 East African embassy bombings — and some believe the Americans may have initially confused the two. When The Sunday Times contacted a senior FBI counter-terrorism official for information about the importance of the detained man, he sent material on al-Liby, the wrong man."

"initially confused the two", yeah right. How many are going to read this correction? Most people will only remember Bush catching one of the big fish.