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 Ag Najem
He is thought to be born at the end of the 1950s in the Adrar des Ifoghas massif. His father of the Kel Adagh tribe was killed by the Malian army in the 1963 Tuareg rebellion at a time where he was a young child. At 20 years old he was recruited as a volunteer in the Libyan army under Gaddafi. He served in Libya and in Chad before returning to Mali to take part in the 1990 Tuareg rebellion led by Iyad Ag Ghaly. He then returned to Libya, rejecting the peace agreement signed between the Malian government and the Tuareg rebels. He became a colonel in the Libyan army and was put in charge of an elite unit in the city of Sabha. The civil war in Libya prompted his return to his homeland.