Eyad Alrababah

Who is Eyad Alrababah?

Eyad Mustafa Alrababah 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 29, 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 and brought them to Connecticut.

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.