Eyad Alrababah
Eyad Mustafa Alrababah (Arabic: اياد مصطفى الربّاح) was a Jordanian citizen arrested following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.
A computer technician, he had lived in West Paterson, New Jersey (now known as Woodland Park) until 2000, when he moved to Falls Church, Virginia, where he befriended two of the hijackers, Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhazmi, at the Dar Al Hijra mosque in March 2001. By the time of the attacks, he was living in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
On September 29, he went to the FBI office in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he claimed that he recognized four of the hijackers, the two from his mosque, and that he had picked them up in June with their two other friends in Virginia (presumably at Falls Church) and brought them to Connecticut (presumably Fairfield, where they spent four days at the Fairfield Motor Inn, and possibly purchased false IDs).
He was arrested on a material witness warrant and held at the Hartford Correctional Center for three weeks in isolation. He was allowed to telephone his fiancée while at the FBI offices for interrogation, since the jail had refused him phone privileges. During these interrogations he was reportedly threatened and verbally abused by an Agent Burkowski. By the end of October he was moved to Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center where he was held in complete solitary confinement for over a month, suffering sleep deprivation and other tactics to coerce his testimony for the FBI. By the middle of November he was transferred again, this time to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was brought before a grand jury, though he was not called to testify.
By December, he'd been moved to the Alexandria City Jail in Virginia where he was formally charged on December 7 with conspiracy and document fraud for falsely vouching for a New Jersey man posing as a Virginian. He changed his initial Not Guilty plea to Guilty for the offense and further admitted to raising money to help illegal Arab aliens to obtain falsified driver's licenses, and was sentenced to time served, though was kept in detention through May 2002 pending his deportation. While he was not accused of providing false IDs for the hijackers, he is thought to have alerted Hani Hanjour to a Virginia loophole about falsely applying for a driver's license that would expedite the process, and six of the hijackers used the same false Virginia address on their identity cards, an address that Alrababah frequently used for his own customers.
In a May 2002 interview, he described Hani Hanjour as secretive and surly and Nawaf Alhazmi as personable and friendly, but he barely knew the other two, having only driven with them once.
References[edit]
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