I blame myself: Ex-ticket agent who checked in two 9/11 hijackers on flight that crashed into Pentagon

As the world marks 20 years of the horrific 9/11 terror assaults, a ticket agent on the Washington space airport who checked-in two of the al-Qaeda hijackers says he has blamed himself all these years and lived the considered what may have occurred “if I had done something different.”

A report by ABC News stated that Vaughn Allex, an American Airlines ticket agent at Dulles International Airport on September 11, 2001, “will never forget the faces of two of the 9/11 hijackers. He looked them in the eye that morning and asked who packed their luggage.”Salem and Nawa Al-Hazmi had run into the terminal and appeared misplaced as they approached Allex’s counter. Even although they had been late, Allex ensured they boarded Flight 77 since that they had two full-fare, first-class tickets.ALSO READ: 20 years of 9/11: From Terror to War on Terror to Return of TerrorLater that day, Flight 77 crashed into the western aspect of the Pentagon. Allex says he has lived together with his resolution for the final 20 years.The report stated guilt has tortured Allex for years.“I blame myself, I thought, you know, if I had done something different, if I’d not let them on, if I just said to the agents, these two guys are late, let them get the next flight. We have one at noon. It’s no big deal,” Allex said.He recalls that the check-in for the two brothers “was odd. The two that I checked in, two brothers, one was kind of gruff and the other one was standing a couple of paces behind him. And this sounds odd, but this is what caught my attention. He was almost dancing, he was moving from foot to foot and grinning and looking around, and my thought was, here’s somebody that’s never been on an airplane and boy is this guy excited,” Allex said in the interview to ABC News.ALSO READ: US President Biden, along with Obama and Clinton pays respects at 9/11 Memorial in New York City”And I kind of watched him for a couple of minutes as we went through the whole check. And he was totally unresponsive as far as whatever we asked him to read, to look verbally. He just smiled and danced and was oblivious to what was going on,” he said in the report.”That’s the image I have, is the two of them standing there and the one just dancing, it was the oddest thing,” he said.He said it was only until mid-morning of September 12, when FBI officials were talking to him that he found that the last two passengers he checked in were two of the hijackers.“I had no idea until that moment that I had been involved in it,” Allex said.ALSO READ: Former US President George Bush warns of danger from domestic terrorists on 9/11 anniversaryUp until that moment he was “dealing like everybody else was with what happened with losing friends, losing passengers, losing the crew. I knew all of the crew on the flight deck and I knew all of the cabin crew, I’d worked with them for years.”Allex, who retired from American Airlines in 2008 and now works for the Transportation Security Administration, recalled that as he seemed on the passenger record and noticed the names of the 2 hijackers, he seemed on the FBI official and stated “I did it, didn’t I?”The officers requested him, ‘what did you do?’ And I am going, ‘these had been the 2 that I put in,'” Allex stated.ALSO READ: Satellite photos present how 9/11 assault seemed like, what has modified after 20 years“The relaxation is historical past I did not know all of September eleventh till that second on September twelfth — I didn’t realise that I had checked-in two of the hijackers.”While his decision on the fateful day haunted him, Allex says, the “turning point” for him came when he saw the 9/11 Commission report and saw his name mentioned in the report.“I’m on page three. I have a little paragraph and a footnote, footnote number 12.””That’s when it began to get higher. That’s once I went — oh my gosh. There had been so many different individuals concerned, there have been so many harmless people who simply touched on this. And I had simply such a small, tiny five-minute a part of it. But earlier than that, it was — it was horrible,” he added.A complete of two,977 individuals died within the terror assaults in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.The assaults, which had been deliberate by al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, noticed 4 US passenger jets seized by suicide attackers two of which had been flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York.Another aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, simply outdoors the US capital, Washington DC, and a fourth aircraft crashed in a discipline in Pennsylvania.WATCH: Remembering 9/11: Twenty years later