Hijacker Shot Passenger on Flight 11
"An internal Federal Aviation Administration memo summarizing the Sept. 11 hijackings says a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11 was shot to death by a single bullet, WorldNetDaily has learned.
FAA memo; 'One bullet fired,' killing 9B occupant.
The FAA claims the memo, time-stamped Sept. 11 at 5:30 p.m., was written in error.
"It was a first draft," said FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown in a phone interview today. "There was no gun."
She said a final draft of the executive summary, received by FAA Administrator Jane Garvey, does not include the account of a gun being fired aboard the plane, which slammed into the first World Trade Center tower not long after departing Boston. Brown refused to release the final draft, however, arguing it is "protected information."
WorldNetDaily has obtained a copy of the first draft of the memo.
Here is the key excerpt, which is very specific:
"The American Airlines FAA Principal Security Inspector (PSI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American Airlines Corporate Headquarters, that an on board flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operations Center and informed that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B at 9:20 a.m.
The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam Al Suqami. One bullet was reported to have been fired."
In fact, Flight 11 had already crashed well before 9:20 a.m. (assuming the FAA memo writer was referring to the Eastern time zone and not a later one). At 8:25 a.m. – nearly an hour earlier than stated in the memo – Flight 11 had turned sharply off its planned westbound path and headed south toward Manhattan. It then crashed into the north tower at 8:48 a.m." - WorldNetDaily (02/27/02)
Friends think Flight 11 Israeli was 'executed'; Daniel Lewin, named in FAA shooting memo, was officer in elite unit of Jewish state's military
"In another tragic irony of Sept. 11, three of the five Islamic hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11 were seated next to an elite Israeli commando. And it may just have gotten that Jewish passenger killed before all the others. In fact, his friends and associates are now sure of it, after reading a secret government memo naming Israeli-American Daniel C. Lewin as a gunshot victim on the flight.
WorldNetDaily published the Federal Aviation Administration memo in an exclusive article Wednesday. The FAA, while confirming the document is authentic, claims the report of Lewin's shooting, written several hours after the Sept. 11 hijackings, was premature and inaccurate. His friends don't buy it.
"Danny was an officer in a secret unit of the Israeli army called 'sayeret matkal,'" said Yehuda Schwartzberg, a childhood friend from Jerusalem. "My guess is that he did something in some way to stand up against the hijackers, and was executed because of it."
Keith Lowery, a business associate of the late Boston high-tech executive who had dual citizenship, says the terrorists may have singled him out because of his "Jewishness" -- as they did Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The FAA memo's summary of the Flight 11 shooting incident, real or not, is the most detailed and specific -- not to mention shocking -- of the four hijacking summaries. It says Lewin, sitting in seat 9B, was "shot by passenger Satam al-Suqami," sitting behind him in seat 10B. (Both names match those on the manifest released by the airline.) "One bullet was reported to have been fired," the memo states.
What's more, the report echoes another account of a fatal struggle in that same business-class section of the plane -- as revealed by the FBI.
An FBI investigative document reconstructing notes of a frantic phone call from a Flight 11 flight attendant to her manager on the ground in Boston, reveals that "a business-class passenger" was killed by the hijackers.
"A hijacker also cut the throat of a business-class passenger, and he appears to be dead," Amy Sweeney relayed to American flight services manager Michael Woodward on the ground at Logan International Airport.
She also relayed the exact seat numbers of the hijackers in the ninth and 10th rows -- the very rows cited in the controversial FAA report.
The FBI's account of the unrecorded call was leaked to the Los Angeles Times, which ran a story Sept. 20.
The 31-year-old Lewin, an Israeli citizen since a teen, was a captain in the Israel Defense Force and had extensive anti-terrorism training.
"Anyone who knows Danny knows that it was not his nature to go down without a fight," Schwartzberg said. "Maybe this (memo) shows that he died a hero."
An FAA special agent agrees.
"With his background in special forces, he would have had more of a fighting instinct click into gear, rather than be herded around" or fooled by their cover, said the agent, who wished to go unnamed. "They probably killed him first because he was fighting back."
Lewin, a graduate of MIT and Israel's Technion, lived with his wife, Anne, and two sons, Eitan and Itamar, in Brookline, Mass., where he helped run Akamai Technologies -- which he co-founded, nearly becoming a billionaire in the dot-com stock boom. He previously worked for IBM's research lab in Haifa, Israel. His parents and brothers all live in Israel.
Attempts to reach his family for comment were unsuccessful.
Lewin was traveling to Los Angeles on business." - WorldNetDaily (03/01/02)
Lewin: Flight 11's unsung hero? 'Knives wouldn't have stopped' ex-Israeli commando, army pal says
"He could bench-press 315 pounds and squat more than 450 pounds as a teen-ager. As an officer in an elite unit of the Israeli army, he was trained to kill terrorists with a pen or a credit card, or just his bare hands.
On Sept. 11, he may have gotten the chance. As fate would have it, Daniel C. Lewin, a 31-year-old Israeli-American, was seated on American Airlines Flight 11 between hijackers Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari in the row in front of him, and hijacker Satam al-Suqami in the row behind him. A secret Federal Aviation Administration executive summary, first uncovered by WorldNetDaily, says that al-Suqami, who would have been sitting directly behind Lewin in seat 10B, shot and killed Lewin with a single bullet.
The FAA maintains the high-level report was a mistaken first draft and that Lewin was more than likely stabbed, not shot, along with American Airlines crew members on Flight 11. (Box cutters were allowed that day through airline security, which the FAA regulated, but not guns.)
But a childhood friend who served with Lewin in the Israel Defense Force says only a bullet would have stopped Lewin. "He'd be more than a match for those skinny little (expletive)," said Brad Rephen, a New York lawyer who grew up with Lewin in Jerusalem. "With his training, he would have killed them with his bare hands."
"I can tell you, their knives would not have stopped him," he added. "He would have taken their knives or their box cutters away and used them against them."
Rephen recalls Lewin's injured hands after he returned from an Israeli anti-terrorist training course.
"They were pretty beaten up from the fighting he did," he said. "He knew how to fight with knives and take knives away from people."
He described Lewin, at about 5-11, 200 pounds, as "thick-boned." He says he witnessed him bench-press more than 300 pounds and squat close to 500 pounds.
"He was very, very strong and had a lot of meat on him," Rephen said. "They couldn't have subdued him by slashing him. The only way they could have stopped him was by shooting him."
Before returning to America, where he worked as an Internet company executive in Boston, the Denver-born Lewin was a captain in Sayeret Matkal, a top-secret reconnaissance unit of the Israeli army used for special anti-terror missions such as the raid on Entebbe. In 1976, Israeli commandos rescued 103 hostages from a gang of Arab terrorists at the airport in the Ugandan capital.
Lewin went on dozens of such missions, friends say. In the '80s, for example, he helped rescue thousands of Jews stranded in Ethiopia. His outfit – Unit 269 – secured the airport there during the airlift operation, friends say. Rephen called Lewin "the best of the best."
"About 2,500 guys try out for the unit he was in," he said. "Twenty-five make it, and one gets chosen as an officer. It was him." He was also extremely tough and determined, Rephen says.
He recalls an earlier time, during basic military training, when Lewin fell into a ravine and was knocked unconscious and rushed to the hospital.
"He was back the next day," Rephen said.
He guesses that Lewin, who understood Arabic, sensed something was wrong on Flight 11 the moment he took his seat next to the three terrorists, including Atta, the ringleader.
"He probably picked up that they were on a suicide mission by what they were saying or wearing," Rephen said.
"Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups put on headbands as badges of their death," he added. "If they put that stuff on, and he saw it, he would have known the ride was over." And then he would have made his move.
"If I know Danny, when he realized what they were doing, he attacked them," Rephen said. "He probably cursed them in Arabic to scare them, and then he hurt them."
He speculates that during the struggle with Atta and the other hijacker sitting in front of Lewin in row 8, al-Suqami shot him from behind.
"I have no doubt they got a gun on the plane as a backup for a situation like that," Rephen said, speculating that they either brought it on board the plane, likely in pieces, or had it planted there earlier by ground services crew.
The FAA report, though very specific, does not indicate whether Lewin was killed during a struggle or while sitting in his seat. Whatever happened, it likely went down within 15 minutes or so of takeoff. Authorities say the pilots were overpowered by then. Rephen, like other Lewin friends and associates contacted by WorldNetDaily, doubts the report of gunfire was written in error.
"If this were an error, they wouldn't have been so fact-specific," Rephen said.
The FBI says the Lewin incident is still under investigation.
"I don't think we know for sure right now if he was killed" on board the flight, said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. "All of this is something we're trying to figure out ourselves."
Attempts to reach Lewin's family were unsuccessful. His wife and children live in the Boston area, and his parents, both doctors, and two younger brothers live in Israel." - WorldNetDaily (03/27/02)