August 29— A MadCowMorningNews
world exclusive.
At least four months before
the FBI says he first arrived in this country, terrorist ringleader Mohamed
Atta was living with (and physically abusing) an American girlfriend at
an apartment they shared across from the Venice Airport.
According to numerous eyewitnesses,
including their next door neighbor and the apartment manager, Atta lived
with a girl named Amanda Keller during March and early April of 2000, four
months before the FBI says he first entered the U.S.
The two shared an apartment
located directly across the street from the Venice Airport at the Sandpiper
Apartments, a drab two-story stucco building which was the American home
of dozens of foreign pilot trainees from Huffman Aviation and the Florida
Flight Training Academy, the two Dutch-owned flight schools that trained
three of the four terrorist pilots.
During her year-long sojourn
in Venice Amanda Keller was a willowy 20-year old bleached-blond, who met
Atta at a bar at the airport, the 44th Aero Squadron), was an out-call
'lingerie model' for an escort service called Fantasies & Lace in nearby
Sarasota, not far from Cheetah's, a nearby strip club Atta is known to
have frequented .
Another 'disappeared'
witness
While Amanda Keller’s present
whereabouts are a mystery, what is clear is that the FBI has been inordinately
eager to suppress the story of her and Atta’s dalliance… so eager that
agents from the Bureau have engaged in a regular and systematic pattern
of intimidation of eyewitnesses to the affair.
"The question they asked
was always the same," says Stephanie Frederickson, who lived next door
to the couple: "You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?"
For six months after the
Sept 11 attack, Frederickson says she received weekly visits from agents
from the FBI’s Sarasota office.
"At first, right after the
attack, they told me I must have been mistaken in my identification. Or
they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get
me to change my story, and just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn’t
been talking to anyone. Who was I going to tell?"
She shrugs. "Most everyone
around here already knew."
"All the news that's ripped
from print."
Curiously, Frederickson says
that a New York Times reporter to whom she told the story also accused
her of making it up, and urged her to stop talking about it.
What makes this especially
strange is that the N.Y. Times reporter need only have read early wire
service reports in the days after the attack to learn that the story about
Atta’s American girlfriend had already been confirmed by numerous witnesses,
even including Amanda Keller herself as well as her mother and the apartment
managers where the duo co-habitated.
"Charles Grapentine, the
manager of Sandpiper Apartments on Airport Avenue in Venice, said he remembers
seeing Atta at the complex for about three weeks in April," read a Sept
15 AP story. " He said Atta was living in the apartment of Amanda Keller."
"In a telephone interview
late Friday, Keller said she met Atta through a friend and let him stay
in the apartment with her and her then-boyfriend, Garrett Metts, because
she felt sorry for him. She said authorities told her not to say anything
at all about Atta," the story continued.
"I can't really discuss anything,"
she said. "I'm afraid I'll get in trouble."
"Real Americans won't
be silenced."
Now the duo's next-door neighbor,
a 50-year old housewife named Stephanie Frederickson, has stepped forward
to testify about the affair, as well as the FBI harassment that has—so
far— been successful in preventing the story from surfacing.
"Amanda moved in next door
first, saying she had come from Orange Park (near Jacksonville," Frederickson
says. "Then one day in the middle of March (of 2000) she brought home Atta.
‘I’d like you to meet
my friend Mohamed Atta,’ she said to me. ‘He’s from France.’"
"Later when I saw her alone
I asked her if she realized that Mohamed Atta wasn’t really a French
name, and he was definitely not French. She looked at me like I was nuts.
I didn’t know if she really believed he was French or not, but it was
clear to me that he wasn't."
The relationship was troubled.
While Atta's cheesy taste for infidel flesh is well-known, he apparently
balked at sharing it with others.
Blows Against the Empire?
"There were a couple of time
he beat her up that I know about," Frederickson says, "mostly over the
slutty way she dressed to go to meet her escort service clients. Her hair
was always done up in a half dozen funky colors and she always dressed…well,
like a hooker."
Frederickson said that Fantasies
& Lace would send a car and driver to get Keller. "And I would hear
the driver and Atta arguing out on the balcony. Atta didn’t want her
to leave."
"The third time he beat her
up she put him out," states Frederickson. "She threw his two suitcases,
and a blue Gold’s gym bag which he always carried around with him, over
the balcony railing onto the driveway in front of the apartments and called
a cab to come get him."
Frederickson was glad to
see Atta leave. "He was a really nasty guy," she says. "He had no patience,
and seemed mad at the world. One day I remember, it was raining out, and
I left the apartment house at the same time he was leaving. He didn’t
have a car then, so I offered him a ride."
"He got furious at me. ‘You
do not speak to me unless I speak to you first!" he shouted.
"‘Hey bub, you’re in
America,' I told him.’
"American women are bitches,’
he told me. I told him the least he could do was thank me for offering
him a ride."
What was the attraction between
Atta and Amanda Keller?
"Atta and his crew were always
flush with lots and lots of money," she says. "These guys were really party
animals."
Although they may have been
well off, their living accommodations didn’t reflect it.
"I lived next door to Amanda
and Atta on the second floor, but then moved downstairs to my father’s
apartment to help him, because he had had surgery and couldn’t climb
stairs any longer," says Frederickson.
"So Atta’s pals took my
old apartment. One time I stuck my head in, and there were at least eight
of them living in a small two-bedroom place, with sleeping bags spread
out everywhere."
Paging the National Enquirer
Our week-long search for
Amanda Keller has failed to locate her current whereabouts. And its raised
more questions than it's answered. Questions like:
Why are you reading about
it first in the MadCowMorningNews?
A girl who makes her living
as a "lingerie model," like Keller, certainly could use the couple hundred
thousand the tabloids would seem eager to pay to run a story titled "Terrorist's
Girlfriend Bares All!"
So why hasn't she? Is something
preventing her? Is she even still alive?
Last Sunday’s Associated
Press headline about the approaching 1-year anniversary of the 9/11 attack
read: "A year later, the 19 hijackers are still a tangle of mystery and
contradiction."
Maybe now we're learning
why.
NEXT: THE COMPANY HE KEPT:
ATTILA THE HUN, SID, & SARAH THE PHARMACIST.
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