Atta's Path to Terror

Newsweek, December, 2001

Sitting in his Cairo apartment, Mohamed Atta's father says it is "impossible" that his son took part in the September 11 attack. But the accumulating evidence suggests otherwise. The real question, given Atta's middle-class background and studious nature, is what led him from the quiet pursuit of a degree in city planning to a double life as an Islamic terrorist. The clues reach back at least to the early 1990s, when Atta came under the spell of the Muslim Brotherhood and its call for the creation of an Islamic state and the rejection of Western influence. Atta hated the haphazard foreign influence on Egyptian society and the advent of skyscrapers in the Middle East: as a graduate student in Hamburg, he wrote his master's thesis on a plan to restore the ancient Syrian city of...