An Egyptian man arrested at Kennedy Airport this week was carrying a pilot’s uniform, a bogus passport, forged FAA papers and a phony certificate from a Florida flight school where terror hijackers trained, it was revealed yesterday.
Wael Abdel Rahman Kishk, 21, was arraigned in an open Brooklyn federal courtroom yesterday on a charge of forging documents. U.S. District Judge Robert Levy ordered him jailed.
Federal prosecutors would not say whether they were investigating Kishk in connection with last week’s attacks, but his lawyer scoffed at the idea.
“The fact that he’s being prosecuted here and not in Manhattan [federal court] under sealed indictment indicates to me he was likely caught up in” governmental vigilance, Legal Aid lawyer Michael Schneider said.
Authorities said in the criminal complaint that Kishk gave evasive and inconsistent answers when he was questioned after arriving from Barcelona, Spain, on Sept. 19.
He had an Egypt Airlines pilot’s shirt and a fake certificate from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where lead hijacker Mohamed Atta was once enrolled. He told probers he forged the papers to “impress his friends.”
Schneider said the fact that the forged documents were rife with misspellings, including the word federal spelled “federral,” shows his client was not part of “the professional operation the government thinks last week’s operation was.”