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On 12 April 1986, Mahmoud Mahmoud Atta (also known as Mahmoud Abad Ahmad), a 33-year-old Jordanian native, ambushed a passenger bus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Atta (working with an accomplice) stopped the bus with a firebomb, then opened fire on it with an Uzi, killing the driver and seriously wounding three passengers. Atta was arrested in Venezuela a year later, but because Venezuela had no extradition treaty with Israel, Venezuelan officials deported him for immigration violations to his country of origin, the United States. (Atta was a naturalized U.S. citizen.) Atta was arrested by FBI agents upon arrival at KennedyInternational Airport and held in prison in the U.S. for more than three years before being extradited to Israel for trial in October 1990. His extradition was controversial because the nature of the extradition treaty in effect required that the accused's offense must be of a non-political nature, and Atta maintained that he had committed political rather than criminal offenses. Nonetheless, the U.S. courts upheld Israel's extradition request on the grounds that Atta had attacked civilian rather than military targets and had therefore committed regular criminal acts, not political acts aimed at the overthrow of a government. In October 1991, an Israeli court found Atta guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Fast forward ten years. As the U.S. tried to piece together the terrorist plot that resulted in four hijacked airliners and the destruction of both World Trade Center towers, they discovered that the mastermind was apparently one Mohamad Atta, who had entered into the U.S. unnoticed and spent well over a year there receiving training at more than one American flight school. Newspapers (both domestic and foreign) begin to criticize U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies for allowing a known terrorist to slip into the country so easily: [The Australian, 2001] [San Francisco Chronicle, 2001] [Boston Globe, 2001] Finally the Boston Globe, at least, caught onto the error and realized that the bus bomber and the hijacker were two different people with the same name: Clearly, the message quoted at the head of this article was wrong in its facts. The Atta who attacked a bus was arrested by the FBI and extradited to Israel, not captured by Israelis, and his extradition didn't take place until two years after Reagan left office. In fact, the Oslo Agreement itself wasn't signed until nearly five years after Reagan left office. All of this makes it rather difficult to support the claim that Atta was released under the terms of the Oslo Agreement at the insistence of President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Schultz (which explains why this information was missing from later reports). What puzzled us was why newspapers, much less US authorities, should have been confused as to whether the two Attas were the same man (especially since one was fourteen years older than the other) or described Atta as someone suspected of or implicated in a bus attack for which he had already been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment ten years earlier. (According to The Jerusalem Post, Atta the bus bomber was eventually freed after the Supreme Court ruled there were faults in the extradition process, but the article did not state when this reversal occurred. Newspaper accounts as late as 1993 still described Atta as serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison.) What we had here appeared to be a case of mistaken identity; the mystery we couldn't solve was why the mistake was made in the first place. In mid-2002 the We freed Atta claim was twinned in e-mail with another popular Internet canard, the Oliver North warned us about Osama falsity. North did speak up about a terrorist during the Iran-Contra hearings, but it was Abu Nidal he mentioned, not Osama bin Laden. Additional Information: WTC Bomber Was Never Held in Israel (The Jerusalem Post) Last updated: 7 March 2008
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