IT’S RARE THAT sources invite you to join them as they run their daily errands. Sometimes, though, it’s worth following them around town as they visit the club, pay their phone bills or drop by the bank.

Particularly when the source is Mohammed Al-Amir Atta, the father and namesake of that Mohammed Atta, the one alleged to have been the mastermind of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the same man said to have flown American Airlines Flight 11 into the first tower of the World Trade Center on that clear, crisp Tuesday morning three years ago.

As I waited for Atta let’s call him Al-Amir, to avoid confusion to pay his phone bill at Mohandiseen’s Shooting Club, he looks to me like a tiny pebble in the sea, an average-looking upper-middle-class man of a certain age you could easily pass on the street without noticing. It’s said you can often take the measure of a man by his face, but I’m not certain. I studied his expression while he lined up to pay, a group of women sitting next to him gossiping as they, too, waited their turns, kids in their sportswear shuttling back and forth.

On his face: A blank stare.

Later, after several visits and more errands, Al-Amir agrees to go on the record. The only catch is that when you sit for an interview with this respected lawyer, you don’t ask questions you answer them. And so it was that we struck a rough deal as we sat in the salon of his pleasant Al-Haram apartment.

“I ask first, you answer,” he declares. “Your turn comes later, after you’ve answered all my questions. So, first, tell me: What makes you think you have the right to ask me about my personal life, and particularly about my son. He’s not a public figure.”

Khaled Habib / Egypt Today Mohammed Atta, Sr., in his Al-Haram apartment, where he blames Jews for 9/11.

“Well, Sir, you know he has been accused of”

“Stop right there! You’ve upset me! Don’t you sing along to that American tune! Don’t play the American saxophone! Use your brain,” he orders.

“Sir”

“If you were a lawyer in my court and told me, ‘They claim he did this and that,’ I would have written you out of the Lawyers’ Syndicate immediately. Even those who defend [Mohammed] by saying there’s no evidence he did it would be dismissed from my court. You know why? Because they know better, they know who did it because the evidence speaks for itself!” he thunders.

As the throbbing veins in his neck protrude beneath his skin, I start to worry. The man just underwent open-heart surgery. Still, there’s no slowing his tirade.

Associated Press Photo Mohammed Atta, Jr., believed to have been the ringleader behind 9/11.

“It was my honor to be the first to spell out the truth for the entire world on Egyptian Television, sitting in the same Shooting Club in which you and I sat just two days ago. They wanted to know: Who did it, if not my son. At the time, politics was just like economics to me it was all Chinese. I was born to be a lawyer, and I was happy in my little world. But you know, a good Muslim’s instincts are stronger and more trusted than the most powerful laser detectors [sic]. Without stopping to think about it, I knew the answer, and I told them clearly: The Mossad did it, working with American right-wing extremists the neoconservatives.

“My words were later proven true by others,” he says, finally slowing down.

Casting a look around his dining room table, it’s clear how he spends his leisure time: piles of books, newspapers and magazines in a rainbow of languages keep him company. He devours their stories, stocking up more “evidence” to back up his views.

The only story he doesn’t buy is the one most people in the world now accept without question: Mohammed Atta, Jr., Al-Amir’s son and namesake, was one of the key organizers of the 19 Al-Qaeda-linked hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks against New York and Washington, DC.

With a degree in architecture under his belt, Atta moved to Germany in 1992 for graduate work at Hamburg University, where he completed a well-regarded thesis on Islamic architecture. While he appeared to be an ordinary graduate student at the time, something in him snapped. Perhaps in Germany, perhaps when he returned home to Cairo.

Associated Press Photo Mohammed Atta’s German professor brandishes a copy of his thesis.

Either way, it is alleged, he fell in with extremists, perhaps members of Al-Zawahri’s Al-Jihad, perhaps Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya. Al-Qaeda came later, when Al-Zawahri and bin Laden formed their pact. The timeline and the “why” are as murky as claims most now discredit that Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi handler with links to Al-Qaeda.

One way or another, Atta wound up in Florida, where he took flight instruction between July and December 2000. As the day of the attack neared, Atta turned to prayer. If the so-called “Doomsday Document” Atta left behind in his luggage is to be believed, he then led his co-conspirators through steps to beg God’s mercy and steel themselves for what was to come.

The last time the world saw the man, as opposed to his deeds, was on video surveillance photos from Maine and Massachusetts released by the police in the aftermath of the attacks. An airport security camera recorded him as he boarded Flight 11; investigators later found his passport, his will and the how-to guide in his rental car at a feeder airport in Maine, where he boarded the flight that took him to Boston and Flight 11.

“I will agree with those who claim Mohammed and Osama bin Laden were behind the attacks, but on one condition: that they give me evidence that proves how they did it. If they do, if they can give me a detailed description and are armed with facts to prove their account, I’ll fall under their spell and blindly follow wherever they lead me. Just tell me how, because unlike them, I live in a world of facts, not speculation.

In Al-Amir’s world, facts must be presented as elegantly as they are themselves ‘concrete.’

“Let’s take silk scarves virtual ones,” he smiles, his eyes sparkling, “In every scarf we’ll wrap a precious fact, because we have to handle them with great care. And more importantly, we must not lose sight of each fact we reveal. It’s like a puzzle each piece leads to a final conclusion.”

I bear with him as he unwraps his first scarf for me: “Tell me,” he says, “how it was that 4,000 Jewish employees didn’t go to [work at the World Trade Center] on that day? We’re not talking about one or two, we’re talking about 4,000 here. Do you want to rule it out as a mere coincidence? Or do you agree with me that only a highly sophisticated organization could make such unprecedented preparations to avoid the death of 4,000 Jews?”

Before I can open my mouth, Al-Amir is on to his next fact. There’s no stopping this train wreck now that it’s been set in motion.

“Let’s open the other scarf! Around 101 businessmen who were supposed to be on [Mohammed’s] flight didn’t get on board that day. They didn’t cancel their tickets. They didn’t reschedule to avoid losing their money. We’re talking about world-renowned penny-pinchers here, people everyone knows are stingy. It makes perfect sense that they were only informed in the last minute so they couldn’t leak the information. After all, caution and complete secrecy are keywords here, lest someone tell his girlfriend or whatever and ruin the whole plan.”

I hastily sip my Coke, knowing I’ll need it before he starts unwrapping his third scarf.

“On 10 September,” Al-Amir continues, “the FBI made a recording of two Congressmen calling people at two different newspapers, each conveying the same vague message: ‘It’s zero-hour. The game starts tomorrow.’ Five months after the attacks, someone revealed the recordings.”

My surprise must have shown. He shoots me a scornful stare, then demands: “Are you sure you’re a journalist? You must know that the FBI reported that two men who work at Boston’s [Logan] Airport met the pilot of the first plane [to crash into the towers], who was a friend of theirs. He asked them where they were going. They told him, ‘Home.’ So he gave them a videotape to take with them it showed him explaining how he would carry out the attack! Where is the videotape? Why did it disappear?”

Before I could suggest that something must exist before it can be made to disappear, Al-Amir plunges on.

“Did you know that the Japanese intelligence [service] published a report stating important facts about the four pilots, who were Americans? It listed their names and birth dates, and revealed they took part in the Vietnam War and were members of [secret Christian societies].”

His next scarf would prove my favorite, if only because I had heard the theory before: “A group of Jews who were huge stockholders in the airlines and insurance companies sold their stocks at the highest possible prices in Europe some 10 days before the attacks on America. When the stock market started functioning again, they competed among themselves on September 17 to buy at the lowest prices so they could make massive profits! Doesn’t this expose their involvement in the crime?”

Jumping back in time, Al-Amir points out that 9/11 wasn’t the first time Arabs were prematurely blamed for an attack, pointing to initial suspicions that Al-Jihad or Hezbollah were behind the April 1995 Murragh Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma. “For nine whole months the media barked like vicious, stray dogs, accusing the Arabs and Ramzi Youssef of the attack! It took an FBI man with a good heart to finally reveal the truth. Why didn’t he speak earlier? Because he feared they would kill him!”

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, home-grown American right-wing terrorists, were eventually convicted of the bombing, which took the lives of 168, including children in the building’s daycare. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison, while McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.

Bellowing as though defending Mohammed in front of the International Criminal Court, Al-Amir jumps to his next theory.

“On the day of his execution, Timothy McVeigh spoke four famous words that people seemed to have forgotten: ‘Revenge will come in September.’ Am I the only one who noticed? Days after his death, his followers put up posters declaring that Christ will not return until six flying snakes spitting fire destroy the symbol of civilization. People at the time didn’t get it. Now, the message has been clearly decoded.”

McVeigh made no final statement before he died that morning by lethal injection. His last written statement was his recopying of the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley.

But I don’t comment as Al-Amir tells me to hold my tongue until I hear the secret wrapped in his final scarf, the most crucial part of the puzzle, he says.

“I deserve to know, just like you do, how four or six Israelis who videotaped the crashes in Manhattan came to be there! They were standing in the middle of the street, dancing in a circle and singing in Hebrew at the moment of the attack. [Police] arrested them and found out they had been videotaping the plane even when it was nearly invisible a tiny speck coming from far away. Pay attention to this! It proves they knew its direction prior to the crash.”

God Almighty!

“But excuse me, Sir, all your claims are”

“They’re all facts published within 24 hours of the attacks! Don’t you play that American tune for me again! All you journalists ask me the same silly question: Why have they never heard such important things before? They did, but their memories are failing them as always, especially now that the US has changed its story! It’s like that democracy-building tune in Iraq”

I tune out for a moment as he rambles on about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, about how he would love to sit down for a cup of coffee with George W. Bush one day. Sinking into the chair as he finally seems to run out of energy, I turn the conversation to the reason I’m here: Mohammed Atta, Jr., and how his actions have affected his father’s life.

“You know, I’ve never been bothered by anyone from the security police. Egyptian authorities even supported me when I refused to speak with the FBI. My power lies in my honor, in my good reputation. No one can defame this.

“Mohammed is similar, you know,” he continues. “He was a brilliant student, and so were my daughters. No one dares harass them. In fact, one of them was just promoted at work.”

As he chains another cigarette, Al-Amir says he feels betrayed by the media’s lies about his son. Gay? How can they claim his son is gay, he demands. Mohammed was simply sweet and shy with women. A decent man. Since when, he asks, does decency automatically translate into homosexuality?

“They’re weak,” he says of my colleagues in the media, “but I’m stronger. I derive my strength from God. You know what the most difficult jihad is? It’s the fight against your own demons to attain peace. You don’t need a bomb or a knife for jihad, you need a clear mind and a good heart. God and His Prophet ordered us not to resort to violence unless we were attacked. Only then can we defend ourselves, like in Palestine and Iraq.

“By the way,” he suddenly adds, “I’m not a big fan of the Muslim Brotherhood. We’re all brothers in Islam why do we need to belong to a group to win approval? To feel we belong? Besides, I consider myself more Christian than the Christians, more Jewish than the Jews. It was all one religion, originally, calling for the same principles, sharing the same beliefs. The Qur’an says as much, but people differed among themselves.”

Fatigue is back in his face as he takes another drag and I press him again to talk about Mohammed.

“Listen, I’m not going to weep or whine. I’m not going to wonder any more why this plague has descended on my family. Why would I talk about fuul when I have kebab in my hand?” he says, inexplicably. “What I told you is really important it’s the meat of the story.

“Besides, it’s so hard to describe my son. He is not a decent man he’s an incredibly decent one. I could not have described him better than did his German professors and colleagues, who made him sound like an angel.”

As he pauses, lost in his own thoughts, I sip my Coke again and notice for the first time the paintings that adorn Al-Amir’s walls. He notices me staring, then explains with a weak smile: “Those were from the good old days.”

Looking into his eyes, I finally I understand how weak and lonely Al-Amir is and how artificial is his strength.

He has a house much larger than this one, he says, but “I spent too much money on its interior decoration. I haven’t set foot in it yet and probably won’t any time soon. But I’m not even considering selling it. I’ve been expecting Mohammed to be the first to enter its doorway.”

As I take my leave, I’m drawn to another work of art, a piece of stained glass I hadn’t noticed before showing a matador plunging yet another sword into the pierced, bleeding body of a raging bull. There’s still life in the beast’s eyes. Life caught between a prayer that the pain will end and one that God will reward its patience with victory in the end.

And you can’t help but wonder: Are Al-Amir and the other families the bull? Or the matador?  et