Ramzi bin al-Shibh
9/11 organizer
Ramzi Mohammed Abdullah bin al-Shibh (Arabic: رمزي محمد عبد الله بن الشيبة, romanized: Ramzī Muḥammad ʻAbd Allāh bin al-Shībh; born May 1, 1972) is a Yemeni terrorist who served as al-Qaeda's communications officer. He has been detained by the United States in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (NSGB) since 2006. He was a "key facilitator" of the September 11 attacks in 2001.
In the mid-1990s, bin al-Shibh moved to Hamburg, Germany, for studies. There, he became close friends with September 11 hijackers Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al-Shehhi. They were members of the Hamburg cell, which planned the details of the attacks. bin al-Shibh was the only one of the four who failed to obtain a U.S. visa; he acted as an intermediary for the hijackers in the United States, by wiring money and passing on information from key al-Qaeda figures. After the attacks, bin al-Shibh was the first to be publicly identified by the U.S. as the "20th hijacker", for whom there have been several more possible candidates.
Bin al-Shibh has been in United States custody since he was captured in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002. He was in custody of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q659976. VIAF identifies the subject as 97678676. The Library of Congress control number is nb2003006573. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 2006, 2001 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ramzi bin al-Shibh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.