The Hamburg Cell, The Mauritanian And Me.
by Anthony C Heaford --- @mancunianquiet on twitter --- 14 July 2026
Perhaps unsurprisingly I believe I’m intimately connected to 9/11’s Hamburg Cell via my meetings in 1997 Yemen. Two key pieces of Intel support that claim: Yousef, my dinner companion near Al Qaidah town Yemen on 25 September 1997, is a 100% facial recognition match for Hamburg Cell member Ramzi bin al-Shibh. I think they’re related, brothers or cousins. Yousef and I spent an hour discussing the causes of and likely reaction to a kamikaze piloted hijacked passenger plane being used to attack the World Trade Center. I can’t prove I had that conversation but identifying Yousef (I guess Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s brother Ahmed) from my photograph should be easy enough for any Intelligence agency genuinely trying to solve 9/11.
My second link to the Hamburg Cell comes from hijacker/pilot Ziad Jarrah; in September 1997 he abruptly changed his studies from dentistry in Greifswald to aircraft engineering in Hamburg. I believe that marked the beginning of the Hamburg Cell’s 9/11 preparations, prompted by my conversations about the 1993 WTC bomb group trying again by hijacking a plane departing Logan airport with box cutters. Those conversations took place before I'd met Yousef, in a factory in Taiz on 22/23 September as detailed here. I suspect the Hamburg Cell was activated by KSM from Yemen on the 24th. Yousef was vetting me on the 25th prior to my meeting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and being taken to a clandestine recruitment interview at the Base by Al Qaidah town on the 26th. Confirming the exact date of Jarrah’s course change application would again be very easy to do if the Military Commission at Guantanamo was really interested in solving 9/11 (they’re not).
The Official Narrative
The one surviving Hamburg Cell member Ramzi bin-al-Shibh was arrested in 2002 and has been physically and psychologically tortured ever since, first in secret CIA run prisons and then at Guantanamo. The Military Commission now claims he's too damaged to even stand trial. But he was a primary source for the hijacker / pilots activities as reported by the 9/11 Commission in 2004 (page 165). It says:
"The available evidence indicates that in 1999, Atta, Binalshibh, Shehhi, and Jarrah decided to fight in Chechnya against the Russians. According to Binalshibh, a chance meeting on a train in Germany caused the group to travel to Afghanistan instead. An individual named Khalid al Masri approached Binalshibh and Shehhi (because they were Arabs with beards, Binalshibh thinks) and struck up a conversation about jihad in Chechnya."
Were the men who executed the greatest terrorist attack in world history really only recruited in 1999 by a stranger on a train because they were Arabs with beards? That is farcical as shall be demonstrated. Regardless of when or where first contact was made, in November 1999 the Hamburg Cell members did meet Mohamedou Slahi (aka The Mauritanian) in Duisburg, Germany (where Jarrah had lived before moving to Hamburg). Slahi was a senior Al Qaeda operator, receiving calls from his uncle in Afghanistan who was using Osama bin Laden's satillite phone. Slahi was already known to and monitored by German police and was even a suspect in the 1999 New Years Eve millennium bomb plot. But clearly he remained free to operate in 1990s Germany as proved by his meeting with the future 9/11 pilots. Slahi advised them on security, travel and arranged contacts in Pakistan who would take them to Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. It must have been very good advice because by December 1999 they were in Afghanistan sat next to OBL. According to the 9/11 Commission they were immediately given a mission to hijack planes and use them as weapons to attack the United States mainland.
An Alternative Narrative
Before embarking on their terrorist careers KSM studied engineering in America and his nephew Ramzi Yousef studied electronics in Britain. I suspect the Hamburg Cell members were following a similar path, getting qualifications in a Western nation while seeking out opportunities to advance their cause. That cause, their grievance, can be summed up in three words: American Foreign Policy.
They will have networked in Germany through front organisations like Al Quds mosque in Hamburg and active operators like Mohamedou Slahi (who I guess was one of KSM’s regional managers). There’s evidence (pictured right) that Slahi setup clandestine communications networks for such sleeper cells using guest-book messaging via innocuous websites he created. That’s very likely how KSM activated the Hamburg Cell and the 9/11 plot, via a guest-book message prompted by my conversations in Yemen. Ziad Jarrah’s abrupt course change and move to Hamburg in September 1997 shows just how ready they were for such an opportunity. That abrupt course change – exact date to be confirmed – marked the formation of the Hamburg Cell for a very specific task: to plan the planes operation.
It’s my assertion that they began planning 9/11 in 1997, within days of my conversations in Yemen. That’s evidenced by the flight manual pictured right in a screenshot from an unpublished post-9/11 interview with KSM and surviving cell member al-Shibh. Al –Shibh described them as his Hamburg Souvenirs. They spent two years planning the attacks – studying flight paths, schedules, pilot training and close quarter combat – before presenting their plan to Mohamedou Slahi / KSM. That’s when they got the go ahead to travel to Afghanistan and meet OBL, but not to gain his permission: I believe OBL’s first statement about 9/11 made in September 2001:
"I have already said that I am not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act."
OBL would not have condemned the attacks if he knew he'd met its perpetrator Mohammed Atta. I believe that meeting was setup by KSM’s boss - the Saudi sponsored Afghan Wahhabi professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf - with the intention of framing OBL and the Taliban for KSM’s terrorist act. That’d be a favour to Sayyaf’s Saudi financiers as OBL represented a grave threat to the Saudi monarchy. As Sayyaf was allied with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, it also meant America would attack his enemies. His aim was to create and lead a Wahhabi state in Afghanistan, something he came very close to achieving with US and NATO backing. The world owes a debt of thanks to the Taliban for preventing that.
My favourite flaw in the official narrative is exposed by multiple witnesses who saw two Hamburg Cell members (Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi) visiting a holiday resort and flight school in the Philippines in 1997, early 1999 and December 1999. Atta was taking flying lessons at the former US air force owned Clark air base*. Witnesses saw Mohammed Atta being collected from the resort by a member of staff at the flying school – a US air force veteran and former master sergeant called Melvin Troth who retired in the Philippines circa 1986**. The future hijackers stayed at the same Woodland Park Resort Hotel each time where staff said they saw a Filipina leaving Atta’s room most mornings – a different woman every night they said. Gina Marcelo (a waitress at the hotel) will later recall that Marwan al-Shehhi threw a party. She said:
“There were about seven people. They rented the open area by the swimming pool… They drank Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey and mineral water. They barbecued shrimp and onions. They came in big vehicles, and they had a lot of money. They all had girlfriends.”
Does that life style really fit into a narrative of devout Muslims attacking the West because they hate our freedoms? No, of course it doesn't. We were sold lie after lie about the 9/11 attacks, lies that have caused Wars, denied Justice and left the public as vulnerable as we were on 10 September 2001. Two very easy ways to start unpicking those lies are the questions I asked earlier - who was my dinner companion Yousef and what date in September 1997 did Ziad Jarrah transfer to study aircraft engineering in Hamburg?
* My old workmate Dave Dean managed a go-go bar for US air force personnel at Clark air base in the 1970s; in 1997 Dean setup my visit to KSM's front company in Yemen. ** There's a massive link between the Philippines and 9/11 from 1994 detailed at the beginning of My 9/11 Timeline
Foot note: There is a bin Laden link to the Philippines but not from Osama - it was his brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa who helped finance the Abu Sayyaf Group on behalf of US & NATO ally Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (9/11's True Mastermind)