Jarrah also confirmed to his family that he had received seven hundred dollars sent to him on top of his usual two-thousand-dollar monthly allowance. He had asked for the money for "fun." People have pointed to this transfer of money as proof that he needed last minute money for the terrorist attacks. But this makes no sense, because the terrorists had plenty of available money from other sources. A number of them even wired a total of $15,000 back to the United Arab Emirates around September 9, because they had more than they could spend. His family sees this transfer as evidence that he was planning a vacation before making his next career move.

The family had bought Jarrah a new Model 300 Mercedes-Benz on September 9. On the phone they joked that one of his sisters would take the car if he didn't come home soon enough. They also talked about his own wedding with Aisel planned for the following summer. The tragic ironies keep piling up. He had talked in recent months for the first time about not only getting married, but having a child. His father had also recently bought land for a mansion he planned to build for his son and daughter-in-law.

If Jarrah was planning on making himself a martyr, it's understandable that he might not be able to say that to his dearly loved family and girlfriend. But to lead them on with plans of marriage and children, saying he would be visiting within two weeks, letting them buy property and a car for him - it seems inexplicably sadistic and completely unnecessary. Clearly he had no idea he was about to die. These facts also raise the question of how al-Qaeda could have trusted such a man for such a vital mission, when the pull of wife, child, friends, and parents could have caused him to change his mind at any time.

He continued to call Senguen nearly every day, as he always did. Mahmoud Ali, the family friend, said Senguen called him September 11 and told him that she had just spoken to Jarrah -- about an hour before he boarded United Flight 93 (stories that he called from the cockpit of Flight 93 are clearly exaggerations). She described the conversation as pleasant and normal, although it is unclear whether she knew he was flying that day. According to a CBC interview with his uncle, his family didn't have the faintest suspicion that Jarrah was being tied to the 9.11 attacks until they were told several days after September 11.

And then on September 11, he vanished. His girlfriend Senguen alerted the police a few days later, calling to report him missing. German federal police said they found a suitcase of ''airplane-related documents'' in her home (note how that is made to sound vaguely ominous, but of course someone training to be a pilot would have some "airplane-related documents"!).

A few days after September 11, Senguen checked into a witness protection program and dropped out of sight, leaving many questions about Jarrah unanswered. She later called Jarrah's family and the FBI, and insisted that Jarrah was not acquainted with any of the other alleged hijackers, which presumably included Alhaznawi.

However, the story of Jarrah doesn't end there. A number of curious items have appeared since his death. In the Flight 93 wreckage, as explained previously, a half burned copy of his passport was found. This is not that remarkable, since a lot of documents have been recovered from the wreckage. But what is remarkable is another document that was also found in the wreckage: an old German work permit of Jarrah's distant cousin, Assem Omar Jarrah. Why on earth would Jarrah have been carrying this document with him at all - what possible use could it have except as scratch paper? Yet because of this document, German weekly Der Spiegel claimed that investigators had discovered the records of the former East German Stassi secret service, showing that Assem served with the Libyan secret service and collaborated with Palestinian terrorist mastermind Abu Nidal in the 1980's. If this is true, and Ziad Jarrah really was a terrorist, then it would be even more inexplicable that he would be carrying documents exposing the illicit past of his distant cousin.

A possible explanation for this rather odd event is that the real terrorists were shadowing Jarrah and looked very closely into his life during the years they monitored him. They somehow discovered that he had a distant cousin who was connected to espionage or terrorism or at least that the Stassi had made some claims to that effect. Assem Omar Jarrah does say he gave this work permit to Ziad, but did not say when. At some point, someone must have then stolen it from Ziad. And finally, on 9-11, someone must have planted it at the Flight 93 wreckage site, to make sure that investigators would discover this link. The odds otherwise - that Jarrah had this useless document with him, that it was one of the few possessions of his surviving the crash; then, that his distant cousin would turn out to have terrorist ties - must be astronomical.

In another surprise discovery, in early November a four-page letter written by Jarrah on September 10 to his girlfriend Aisel was found by US authorities. Presumably, it had been sent to the wrong address, and thus eventually returned to the US. Why Jarrah would suddenly forget the address of where his girlfriend had lived since early 1999 is not explained. Only a few quotes from this letter have been made public. He says, "I have done what I had to do," and "You should be very proud because this is an honor and in the end will bring happiness to everyone." This has been taken as proof that he knew he was going to be a martyr.

But setting aside the possibility that the whole letter is a forgery, there is the possibility that these two sentences could have been taken out of context. He had just gotten his pilot's license - could he be talking about that? His father says, "Ziad wanted to become a pilot since he was five years old. He didn't care whether he would be a civilian or a military pilot. He was crazy about airplanes. The only books he ever borrowed from the library were about airplanes. I stopped him from being a pilot. I only have one son and I was afraid that he would crash." It appears that Jarrah may have tricked his parents into thinking he was still studying to be an aeronautical engineer and would be continuing his classes in Hamburg after taking some aeronautical courses in the US. So this letter may have been a coming out of sorts - the sentences could easily refer to him revealing that he was following his dream to be a pilot over his father's wishes, something that in the end would make his family proud.

In any case, if it is a suicide letter, its a strange one, because he also "talks of plans for a future meeting, as Jarrah tells her to 'hold on to what you have until we see each other again.'" Even stranger, the package also contained papers about Jarrah's flight training and scuba-diving instruction. Scuba-diving lessons? More typical behavior of a terrorist and a martyr? The scuba diving could easily explain his "unexplained trips" to the nearby Bahamas, since there is good scuba diving there but none in the greater Miami area where he lived.

Though it hasn't been made public, the cockpit voice recorder for Flight 93 did survive. A few snippets were released; you can listen to them on this website. Jarrah is said to have spoken English with a German accent. He is also said to have been the pilot whose voice can be heard in these recordings. Given his accent, it should be easy to determine if the voice was his or not. His uncle Jamal explained, "'Ziad was not a hijacker... To this day they have no proof Ziad was the pilot.' What about the cockpit voice recorder? 'That's not Ziad's voice.' What about the good-bye letter to Aysel, the kick-boxing lessons in Florida, the message on Atta's cell phone? What about all the documents about death in martyrdom? 'Fabricated. False. Inventions.' But why? 'The Americans shot down the plane, so they've got to make it look hijacked.'"

Terrorist or duped, was the real Jarrah actually on Flight 93? DNA remains would be able to answer that question. In December 2001, US officials announced that everyone on Flight 93 had been positively identified through their DNA, except for the four hijackers. Their remains are grouped by common DNA. Because they don't have any DNA to check them by, "The death certificates will list each as 'John Doe.'" The other accused hijackers were all from Saudi Arabia, and virtually no information and certainly no DNA has yet come out for them. But Jarrah's family has said, "We are ready to cooperate with the authorities." They would like to know if their son was a terrorist and murderer. In mid-August 2002, a new report on the victims' remains noted the DNA still had not been checked, because "little attention has been paid to the terrorists' remains."

As one reporter put it, Ziad Jarrah is "no neat fit into any conspiracy puzzle, with no clear motivation or any obvious ties to an identifiable organization." Clearly the terrorists were brilliant in stealing identities and keeping their true identities hidden. Probably each case was slightly different, and with Jarrah they had the incredible luck of a look-alike with a similar name. The FBI investigators made their work easy. For instance, according to an FBI document given to German police, the FBI initially put Jarrah and the three other accused hijackers on the hijacker list simply because theirs were the only Arabic sounding names on the flight manifest. But still, the terrorists made mistakes. Numerous clues pointing to a doppelganger for Jarrah, including solid evidence that he was in two places at once on more than one occasion, has been ignored or brushed aside by the media and the FBI investigation. Until we get smart enough to see through the cover stories and stolen identities, we will never know who the real hijackers were, and never really understand what happened on September 11.

This report was originally published by the Center for Cooperative Research