Eyad Alrababah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born in Palestine, 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 until 2000, then 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 29th, 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 7th with charged 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 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, though said that Nawaf Alhazmi was personable and friendly - he barely knew the other two, having only driven with them the one time.
