FAA Sends Newsletter To Hijacker

The Federal Aviation Administration mailed its regional pilots newsletter to one of the Sept. 11 hijackers just last month.

Kathleen Bergen, an FAA spokeswoman in Atlanta, said Wednesday that she did not know why Ziad Samir Jarrah's name had not been removed from the mailing list earlier.

The incident came to light just weeks after it was disclosed that the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent official notice to a Florida flight school six weeks after the attacks that two of the other hijackers had been approved for student visas. The episode embarrassed the INS and prompted a shake-up at the agency.

Jarrah, a 26-year-old from Lebanon, was believed to have piloted United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, apparently after the passengers fought back.

The quarterly newsletter addressed to Jarrah was sent to his former apartment near Fort Lauderdale.

The issue happened to contain an American flag and an editorial about the World Trade Center attack that said: "We hope for justice to be served to those individuals who horrified our great nation."

The newsletter comes from the agency's Oklahoma City office and is mailed to pilots in five Florida counties, Bergen said. It typically contains reports on local crashes and the lessons to be learned from them.

"It's something completely innocuous," Bergen said of the mailing, which is also available online.

Jarrah is the only one of the 19 hijackers known to be on the mailing list, Bergen said. The FAA's mailing list for its regional newsletters includes the nation's 625,600 pilots, she said.