Abdussattar Shaikh

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Abdussattar Shaikh' (ar عبد الستار شيخ)(born Abdussattar Chhipa) is an FBI informant who was called "The FBI's Best Chance to Uncover September 11th Before it Happened" by the Joint Congressional 9.11 Intelligence Committee.

In the year 2000 two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar moved in with Abdussattar. However, he did not provide his FBI contact Steven Butler with any information about the two; Butler claims that the names "Nawaf and Khalid" were only mentioned in casual conversation as two students who had rented rooms from him, and that once Abdussattar had cut a phonecall short stating that "Khalid's in the room".

Butler later asked Shaikh for their surnames, but was not given them. He was not told they were pursuing flight training, nor other details Abdussattar would have surely known that might have helped prevent the 9/11 Attacks. Shaikh says the students are non-political and have done nothing to arouse suspicion.

"They were nice, but not what you call extroverted people" Shaikh told The San Diego Union-Tribune after the attacks. Still, he told reporters he bonded with Alhazmi, helping him open a bank account and place a personal ad on the World Wide Web" "He told me that he wanted to marry a Mexican girl," Shaikh told the Los Angeles Times. "The problem was that he didn't know any Spanish. So I taught him a few Spanish phrases.

The 9/11 Commission Report later discovered that the bank account was opened using $9,900.

The FBI has aroused suspicion of its own for claiming that he was a retired professor of English at San Diego State and Vice President for International Projects at American Commonwealth University. However it turned out that SDS had no records of ever staffing him, and ACU was merely a scam-diploma mill similar to those seen in countless e-Mail forwards, though this one started by retired Air Force General William Lyon.

Abdussattar's exact relationship with the students remains unknown.

[edit] Citizens Review Board on Police Practices

Shaikh sat on San Diego's Citizens Review Board on Police Practices (CRBPP) during the time frame of his co-operation with the FBI. Ethical questions arose about his qualifications for city employment, as active police informants are precluded from employment on police oversight committees for obvious reasons. Joe Cantlupe was one reporter whose articles about Shaikh and the CRBPP appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Shaikh was later removed from the board.