He was one of the four hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93, which was crashed into a field in a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, following a passenger revolt, as part of the September 11 attacks.

He trained at Huffman Aviation together with Atta and Al-Shehhi with their flight instructor Rudi Dekkers from June 2000 to January 2001, after relocating to Florida from New Jersey.

Four days later, he boarded United Airlines Flight 93, and was believed to have taken over as the pilot of the aircraft along with his team of hijackers, which included Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Nami and Ahmed al-Haznawi, who together made an attempt to crash the plane into either the United States Capitol or the White House, which was thwarted when the passengers revolted against the hijackers.

He was brought up in a working class quarter of the city, Tariq al-Jadida, and received his primary and secondary education from schools in that area.

His father, Samir Jarrah, worked as a social service inspector for the Lebanese government and his mother taught at an elementary school.

[6] In September 1997, Jarrah left Greifswald and instead began studying aerospace engineering at the Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences) in Hamburg, while working at a Volkswagen paint shop in nearby Wolfsburg.

While in Hamburg, he rented an apartment from Rosemarie Canel, who would paint a portrait of him that he would bring back as a gift for his mother that December.

[8] In late 1999, Jarrah, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Said Bahaji, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh decided to travel to Chechnya to fight Russian soldiers in the Second Chechen War.

Khalid al-Masri and Mohamedou Ould Slahi convinced them at the last minute to travel instead to Afghanistan to meet with Osama bin Laden and train for terrorist attacks.

To hide his travels to Afghanistan (which may have concerned security officials at international airports) Jarrah reported his passport stolen in February 2000 and received a blank duplicate, just as hijackers Atta and Shehhi had done the previous month.

According to Dekkers, both Jarrah and al-Shehhi were good students, unlike Atta, who misbehaved and refused to follow instructions.

Dekkers also said that he went with al-Shehhi and Jarrah to a bar in Sarasota, Florida named Shamrock Pub after one of their flight lessons.

[17] On his way back to the US, he passed through the United Arab Emirates, according to that country's officials, where he was initially reported as having been interviewed by authorities on 30 January 2001, at the request of the CIA.

Jarrah rented a new apartment in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea after both men gave the landlord photocopies of their German passports, which he later turned over to the FBI.

[23] On 25 June, Jarrah took Haznawi to Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on the advice of his landlord.

"[25] In mid-July 2001, some of the hijackers and members of the Hamburg cell gathered near Salou, Spain, for a period of a few days up to a couple of weeks.

[28] On 7 September 2001, all four of the Flight 93 hijackers flew from Fort Lauderdale to Newark International Airport aboard Spirit Airlines.

[32] On 10 September, Jarrah spent his final evening writing a letter to Şengün, with whom he had made marriage plans.

"[35] According to one source, Jarrah had set up a large mock cockpit made of cardboard boxes in his apartment just before the attacks.

[22] At 5:01 AM on 11 September 2001, Jarrah in Newark placed a phone call to United Airlines Flight 175 hijacker pilot Marwan al-Shehhi in Boston; the pair spoke for less than a minute, likely to confirm that the plan for the attacks was ready to proceed.

Before boarding, Jarrah called his girlfriend Aysel Şengün from a public telephone at the airport, repeating the words "I love you" over and over.

"[42] At least two of the cellphone calls made by passengers indicate that all the hijackers they saw were wearing red bandanas, and indicated that one of the men, believed to be either al-Haznawi or al-Nami, had a box tied around his torso, and claimed there was a bomb inside.

Jarrah became a suspect as FBI agents found a "Ziad Jarrahi" in the flight manifest (the additional i at the end a possible misspelling).

However, the October 2006 emergence of a video shot on 18 January 2000, showing Jarrah recording his will alongside Mohamed Atta has cast heavy doubt on such claims.

[12] Shortly after the 11 September attacks, family and friends claimed that Jarrah did not exhibit the same "smoldering political resentments" or "cultural conservatism" as Mohamed Atta and the other hijackers.

Although his family was Sunni Muslim, Jarrah was not raised with a background of religious conviction and did not hold to an obviously conservative lifestyle.

[5] His uncle, Jamal Jarrah, is currently a deputy in the Lebanese parliament and was appointed minister on 18 December 2016, and a member of the Future Movement, a pro-Saudi Arabian political party led by Saad Hariri.

On 2 January 2012, in a televised interview on Future TV, MP Jarrah denied his nephew's involvement in the 9/11 attacks, alluding to a conspiracy.

[citation needed] On 23 October 2001, John Ashcroft claimed that Jarrah had shared a Hamburg apartment with Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi,[47] though German authorities that same day told the Los Angeles Times that they had no evidence that any of Jarrah's three apartments in Hamburg had been connected with the other hijackers.

[48][49] In October 2006, an al-Qaeda video was released showing Jarrah and Mohamed Atta recording their wills in January 2000 in Osama bin Laden's Tarnak Farms base near Kandahar, Afghanistan.