Lawyers for the family of a Sept. 11 victim want to question a United Airlines worker who they say might have contacted terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta on the day of the attacks.
According to court papers filed yesterday, the lawyers “believe that FBI reports and records show that a call was placed from Julie Ashley’s cellphone to hijacker Mohamed Atta’s cellphone on or about Sept. 11, 2001.”
The filings in Manhattan federal court are in support of a suit against the airline by Mary Bavis, whose son, Mark Bavis, a Los Angeles Kings NHL hockey scout, died when al Qaeda hijackers crashed United Flight 175 into the south tower of the World Trade Center.
The court papers also reveal that Ashley’s husband, Iranian-born pilot Ahmad Farid Khorrami, was jailed for three months right after the attacks on suspicion of links to some of the Sept. 11 hijackers
“The fact that Ashley’s husband was not charged with any crime related to 9/11 does not allow Julie Ashley to avoid testifying in a civil trial,” wrote Bavis’ lawyer, Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general at the US Department of Transportation.
Schiavo’s Jan. 12 letter, which was sent to a Justice Department lawyer, requested copies of all FBI reports concerning Ashley and Khorrami and any phone calls between them and “any 9/11 hijacker or other indicted or publicly disclosed terrorist.”
Neither Schiavo nor Ashley — who on 9/11 was working in Chicago as the manager of United customer baggage services — returned a call for comment.
But in a sworn affidavit, Ashley, 47, a resident of Wheaton, Ill., insists that “at no time prior to, on or after September 11, 2001, did I have contact with any of the September 11th hijackers.”
Ashley also cites the extensive probe of her husband, who was arrested by the feds shortly after Sept. 11.
Khorrami was released after no connections were found between him and hijacker Waleed Al-Sheri, or with other hijackers who studied at a flight school where Khorrami was formerly an instructor.
The FBI declined to comment.
Khorrami became a US citizen in 2008 and is currently suing the Department of Justice over his arrest and incarceration.
In court papers, United says there is “no reason” for Ashley to be deposed or listed as a possible witness for Bavis’ wrongful-death suit against the airline, which is set for trial in June.
The filing calls the request the latest in a series of “fishing expeditions” by the plaintiff’s lawyers.