Two other men connected to the Sphinx Trading location were arrested on September 11 on suspicion of being connected to the hijacking plot.
Forced off an airplane when all flights were grounded that day, the men were carrying cash, passports, hair dye and box-cutters. Both men had shaved their entire bodies, consistent with instructions followed by the 9/11 hijackers.
They lived half a block away from the Al-Salaam Mosque and Sphinx.
One of the two men also kept a mailbox at Sphinx Trading Co.[25]
BURNS SECURITY
One of the most intriguing links between Mohamed and 9/11 is also perhaps the least explained.
During the 1990s, Mohamed made various efforts to infiltrate sensitive U.S. locations, presumably in keeping with his ongoing mission to collect intelligence on behalf of al Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
In 1995, Mohamed obtained employment with the Burns International Security Co., a private company that provided security services to businesses and government agencies. (Timothy McVeigh once worked for the company's armored car division.)
Mohamed was assigned as a security guard at a Northrop Grumman facility that developed sensitive components used in nuclear weapons. Mohamed sought a security clearance to work in the facility's classified areas, but his application was denied.[26]
Burns is a massive conglomerate with multiple divisions and thousands of employees. It was bought by and became a division of Securitas in 2000. So it's difficult, on many levels, to judge whether Mohamed would have been able to leverage his access usefully. Certainly, the Egyptian's track record with the U.S. Army certainly showed that he was capable of exploiting any kind of access to maximum effect.
Although it would be premature to make a definitive statement about what Mohamed may have accomplished through this job posting, Burns Security did surface on September 11 -- in two different capacities.
A Burns division known as Globe Aviation Services provided checkpoint screening at Logan Airport, including two specific checkpoints used by the 9/11 hijackers.[27] As previously noted, Mohamed did a great deal of work for al Qaeda regarding airline security, including surveillance of airports, devising hijacking schemes and smuggling box-cutters onto planes for use as a weapon.
Burns was also connected to a still-unexplained incident in Virginia. Shortly after September 11, the FBI arrested a Burns employee from the Washington, D.C. area named Mohammed Abdi.
Abdi was a Somali national. He left that country for America in 1993 -- shortly after Ali Mohamed was rumored to have trained Somali insurgents on behalf of al Qaeda.[28] After moving to the United States, he worked in a food service job at Reagan National Airport, then subsequently for Burns as a security guard at a federal mortgage processing facility.
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