The banality of evil
The terrorists hung out, did laundry. Then they murdered
The chipped paint, scuffed doors, and shattered windows of the Valencia Motel in Laurel, Md., leave little doubt about what this place is--a $280-a-week crash pad for illicit lovers or locals down on their luck. Just steps from an adult bookstore, it seems an unlikely spot for five neatly dressed Muslims to have nourished their fanatical contempt for promiscuous Western ways. Yet here, crammed into the dingy living room and galley kitchen of Room 343, at least five terrorists did their best to blend into the strip mall scenery of Route 1. They hung out at the pizzeria, munched chocolate-chip cookies from the Giant supermarket, buffed up on weight machines at Gold's Gym. Here, too, they put the finishing touches on their plan to commandeer a fully fueled Boeing 757 and ram it full throttle into the Pentagon.
Suburban Maryland is just one of the many nondescript locales being scoured by FBI agents trying to unravel the complex network that helped support and finance the worst terrorist attack in American history. The terror cell that camped out here in the days leading up to September 11 offers some clues about how the operation worked. Its members had loose ties to each other, shared addresses here and elsewhere, attended flight school, and traveled freely. Dressing and acting as Americans--even engaging in behavior they professed to abhor, like watching adult videos--they lived unnoticed, sometimes for years. "They just looked like five good guys," says neighbor Gail North, "but they turned out to be the worst."
"There is going to be a bombing." Officials say that six of the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center ended up in Maryland--all five hijackers from American Airlines Flight 77 and another believed to have piloted the plane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside. Two of the men, Salem Al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Midhar, were on the FBI's watch list weeks before the attack, suspected of having ties to Osama bin Laden. Al-Midhar was seen at a meeting in Malaysia last year with one of the organizers of the deadly attack on the USS Cole. No one knows for sure why the hijackers chose to stay in Laurel. But sources note that the city is home to Muslim cleric Moataz Al-Hallak, a teacher at a local Islamic school who testified three times before a grand jury investigating bin Laden and the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. According to Al-Hallak's lawyer, the FBI said it had information that the cleric said "there is going to be a bombing, and I do not want to be there." But in a three-hour interview with a federal prosecutor, Al-Hallak denied recognizing any of the 19 hijackers and said he had no connection to the attacks.
In the days leading up to the attacks, the hijackers of Flight 77 shopped, did laundry, practiced their piloting skills, and worked out. At a mall in Greenbelt, the five of them bought day passes or weekly memberships to Gold's Gym and lifted weights for about an hour and half most days. "They weren't on the masculine side," said Gene LaMott, CEO of Gold's Gym International Inc. "They looked like students from the university." K. J. S. Soni, the owner of the Luggage N Things store at the mall, remembers hijacker Hani Hanjour coming into his shop and trying to bargain for a $12.95 black leather wallet; he wanted it for $7. Investigators were also trying to determine whether the hijackers bought the box cutters they used in the attack at the mall's hardware store.
advertisement
