Mohamed Atta
Atta was born in 1968 in a small town in Egypt's Nile Delta. He was 10 years old when he moved with his family to the Abdeen section of Cairo. Atta studied architecture at Cairo University, graduating in 1990, and continued his studies in Germany at the Hamburg University of Technology. In Hamburg, Atta became involved with the al-Quds Mosque, where he met Marwan al-Shehhi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Ziad Jarrah, together forming the Hamburg cell. Atta disappeared from Germany for periods of time, spending some time in Afghanistan, including several months in late 1999 and early 2000 when he met Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders. Atta and the other Hamburg cell members were recruited by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the "planes operation" in the United States. Atta returned to Hamburg in February 2000, and began inquiring about flight training in the United States.
Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou
Mohamedou was born in Atar, Mauritania. He studied in Spain at the Lycée Français de Madrid where he obtained his Baccalaureate in Economic and Social Sciences, in France where he received a law degree at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University Paris I, and the United States, where he earned a Bachelor in International Relations at Hunter College in New York and a Master's and a Ph.D. in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate School. In 1996-1997, he was Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University and in 1998 Research Associate at the Ralph Bunche Institute on the United Nations in New York.