The laughing 9/11 bombers

LONDON: A video of the two 9/11 hijackers, including the ring leader Mohammad Atta reading his “martyrdom” will inside Afghanistan at Osama Bin Laden’s headquarters has emerged five years after the Qaeda outrage.

It is the first time that a videotape has appeared of Mohammed Atta — who flew an American Airlines plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center — at a training camp in Afghanistan. It fills in a significant gap in the timing of the build-up to the attacks on the United States.

Dates on the tape show Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000, together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck. The Sunday Times obtained a copy of the video through a previously tested channel. The tape has no soundtrack.

Despite the deadly tasks the men had been assigned, they appear in high spirits, laughing and smiling in front of the camera. Only when Atta, with an AK-47 propped on a wall beside him, reads a document marked in Arabic “the will”, does he become solemn. Both are well groomed, without the haggard appearance of the identity mugshots issued after September 11.

The film shows Bin Laden addressing his followers at the mud-walled complex near Kandahar. One of the main figures in the September 11 plot, Ramzi Binalshibh, is identifiable in the crowd, as is a bodyguard whose task was to kill Bin Laden with two bullets to the head if he faced capture.

Dating on the tape indicates that the Qaeda leader was filmed on January 8 2000, 10 days before Atta and Jarrah recorded their wills.