Patrick Flannery could not have known that the man who entered his family’s Arizona restaurant would later commit an atrocity that reshaped world history. But he knew he would never forget the man’s piercing stare.
Those striking brown eyes belonged to Hani Hanjour, the al-Qaeda terrorist who later hijacked the plane that crashed into the Pentagon during the September 11 attacks.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Flannery has spoken for the first time about his unsettling encounters with the restaurant regular—and why the memories have stayed with him for more than 25 years.
Around the turn of the century, an otherwise routine day at the Left Seat Restaurant at Scottsdale Airport was interrupted when five men in grey overalls approached the counter to pay for lunch.
Flannery assumed they were pilots, part of the regular flow of aviation students and private-jet customers who visited the restaurant.
His mother had noticed the men first. She touched Flannery’s hand and leaned over to tell him: ‘Those are Saudi pilots who are taking flying lessons here.’ Then she added words that would later sound unbearably ironic: ‘Isn’t that neat? They are our allies.’
Flannery turned to look. In the center of the group stood an obvious leader, cracking jokes in Arabic and sending the others into fits of laughter.
Although he could not understand the conversation, Flannery remembers the man’s moustache, short hair and light stubble, along with his ‘piercing eyes that bore into you.’ Above all, he recalls the direct eye contact they shared from barely two feet apart.
Patrick Flannery recalls the moment he came face to face in his family’s restaurant with a man he would later identify as one of the 9/11 hijackers
Flannery said Hani Hanjour, a regular at the restaurant, led the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77
Patrick recalled Hanjour standing with four other men and joking in Arabic as they waited at the counter after lunch. He also remembered that the group usually sat in the booth pictured here
When images of the 19 hijackers were shown after the attacks, Flannery said his stomach dropped as he recognized one of the faces
He continued with his day, but the man’s face remained fixed in his memory.
‘The image of his face burned in my brain,’ Flannery recalled. ‘It never left me.’
Less than two years later, photographs of the 19 September 11 hijackers appeared across television screens. Flannery says he recognized the man immediately.
‘There he was. I mean, clean as day,’ he said. ‘I would never forget this guy’s face.’
The man Flannery identified was Hani Hanjour, who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 before it struck the Pentagon on September 11.
Five hijackers seized Flight 77 after it departed Washington Dulles. The Boeing 757 was turned back toward Washington and, at 9.37am, deliberately flown into the Pentagon. All 64 people aboard the aircraft and 125 people inside the building were killed.
Hanjour spent considerable time in Arizona training as a pilot. He earned a private pilot’s license before receiving a Federal Aviation Administration commercial pilot certificate in 1999. He later returned to Arizona with fellow hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi for additional training.
For Flannery, the scale of Hanjour’s crimes made that seemingly ordinary meeting—and the memory of it—almost impossible to live with.
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Flannery’s mother had told him ‘Isn’t that neat? They are our allies’, he says
His long-term partner Margie added that none of the servers would want to wait on their tables on account of their lack of tips
When the suspects’ images were released Flannery’s mother told him that Nawaf Alhamzi, who also trained in Arizona, was another of the restaurant’s regulars
Flannery and his partner Margie
The revelation was all the more unsettling because the men were far from strangers to the restaurant. Flannery’s family had owned the Left Seat from 1987 until February 2000, and the men came in repeatedly while taking flying lessons. Margie, Flannery’s longtime partner, worked there and served them frequently.
The other waiters did not particularly want their tables, but the reason was strikingly mundane: the men were known never to tip.
According to Flannery, his mom pointed out Nawaf al-Hazmi after the attacks and told him that she had seen him eat at the family restaurant several times. Al-Hazmi was one of the five hijackers aboard Flight 77 alongside Hanjour and also trained at the airfield.
For Flannery, the discoveries brought a terrible sense of guilt. ‘You can imagine the shock and horror that our family felt knowing that these evil men had eaten at our restaurant.’
He added: ‘I still feel bad in my heart that we served them food.’
But while those encounters seemed utterly unremarkable inside the restaurant, elsewhere in Arizona questions were beginning to surface.
In July 2001, FBI agent Kenneth Williams, working out of Phoenix, wrote a memorandum raising concerns about the number of people of investigative interest attending civil aviation schools in the state. Williams suggested that Osama bin Laden might be directing students to the United States for flight training and urged the FBI to examine the pattern more closely.
‘You can imagine the shock and horror that our family felt knowing that these evil men had eaten at our restaurant,’ Flannery said
As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 passed, the documentaries and coverage brought the memory back to Flannery with renewed force
The memorandum became known as the Phoenix Memo. It did not identify the September 11 plot, nor was it specifically a warning about suicide pilots. But it showed that, before the attacks, an FBI agent had already noticed an unusual pattern around Arizona’s flight schools.
Flannery knew nothing of the memo. He had no reason to connect the men sitting at his family’s tables with anything more sinister than a flying lesson and a meal they would, as the staff had learned, leave without tipping.
For years, he kept the story largely to himself. He said the memory ‘tainted’ how he saw his family restaurant, ‘hurt his heart’ and left him with ‘a sour feeling in my stomach.’
‘I didn’t share this with anyone in the media for all these years because actually it is still hurtful,’ he said.
He had once imagined he might ‘let the story die with me’ when his time came. Then, as the 25th anniversary passed, the documentaries and coverage brought the memory back with renewed force.
‘Every single year I think of that man’s face because I was so close to him,’ Flannery said. ‘You never know who you’re standing next to anymore.’