Mohamed Atta
Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta ( ; ""  ; September 1, 1968 – September 11, 2001) was an Egyptian hijacker and one of the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks in which four United States commercial aircraft were commandeered with the intention of destroying specific civilian targets. He served as the hijacker-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 and crashed the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the coordinated attacks. At 33 years of age, he was the oldest of the 19 hijackers who took part in the attacks.
Mohamed Atta
In 1994, Atta's professor, Dittmar Machule, invited him to Aleppo for a three-day archaeological visit. Atta ended up spending several weeks in Aleppo during August 1994, and visited again that December. While in Syria, he met Amal, a young Palestinian woman, who worked there in the planning bureau. Volker Hauth, who was traveling with Atta, described Amal as "attractive and self-confident. She observed the Muslim niceties, taking taxis to and from the office so as not to come into close physical contact with men on the buses. But, she was 'emancipated' and 'challenging'." They appeared to be attracted to one another, but Atta regretfully explained to Hauth that, "she had a quite different orientation and that the emancipation of the young lady did not fit." This was the closest thing to romance for Atta. In mid-1995, Atta spent three months in Cairo with fellow students Volker Hauth and Ralph Bodenstein, on a grant from the Carl Duisberg Society. They looked at the effects of redevelopment in the Islamic Cairo old quarter which the government wanted to develop for tourism. Atta remained in Cairo with his family, after Hauth and Bodenstein returned to Germany.