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.
Hamida al-Attas
Hamida al-Attas (, "Ḥamīdah Ibrahīm"; born 1934) born A'alia Ghanem, is the mother of Osama bin Laden. She came from a Syrian family of citrus farmers, with two brothers and another sister, living in two small coastal villages, Omraneya and Babryon, outside the port of Latakia. She grew up in a family of Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam. At age 14, she married Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden in Latakia in 1956 and moved to Saudi Arabia with her husband. She was the eleventh wife of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. Her husband had many wives and he divorced most of them, as having only four wives at once was in accordance with Muslim law. It has been reported that she was a concubine rather than wife of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. She was more cosmopolitan than Mohammed's first three Wahhabi Saudi wives.