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Flight Instructor Details 9/11 Training
ALEXANDRIA, Va._Two of the pilot-hijackers from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks abandoned a small airplane on a taxiway of Miami International Airport during their flight training, but their actions didn't attract serious scrutiny from federal officials, a witness in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial said Wednesday.
A flight instructor at the school where Sept. 11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi received commercial pilot training testified at the death-penalty trial of Moussaoui, who has confessed to being an al-Qaida terrorist.
Instructor Daniel Pursell testified that instructors at the school breathed "a collective sigh of relief" when Atta and al-Shehhi completed their training and left the school.
Pursell said that the Dec. 26, 2000, incident at the Miami airport was one of several problems the school had with the pair.
Pursell said the Federal Aviation Administration called the Florida school to berate school officials after the plane was left on the runway, but he said the FAA never questioned Atta and al-Shehhi.
Prosecutors were presenting testimony about the Sept. 11 pilot-hijackers' training in an apparent effort to show parallels between Moussaoui's flight training and that of the other hijackers.
During testimony Tuesday, a terrorism supervisor in FBI headquarters dismissed a field agent's concerns about Moussaoui in the weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, as "hunches and suppositions."
