List of Famous people who died in 2001

Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta was an Egyptian hijacker and the ringleader of the September 11 attacks in which four United States commercial aircraft were commandeered with the intention of destroying specific civilian and military targets. He served as the hijacker-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 which he crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the coordinated attacks. At 33 years of age, he was the oldest of the 19 hijackers who took part in the attacks.

Phoolan Devi, popularly known as "Bandit Queen", was an Indian female rights activist, bandit and politician from the Samajwadi Party who later served as Member of Parliament.

Welles Remy Crowther was an American equities trader and volunteer firefighter known for saving as many as 18 lives during the September 11 attacks in New York City, during which he lost his own life.

Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias and, after the Taliban takeover, was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.

Marike de Klerk was the First Lady of South Africa, as the wife of State President Frederik Willem de Klerk, from 1989–1994. She was also a politician of the former governing National Party in her own right. De Klerk was murdered in her Cape Town home in 2001.

Ziad Samir Jarrah was a member of al-Qaeda and one of the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. Jarrah was the hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, crashing the plane into a field in a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania—after a passenger uprising—as part of the coordinated attacks.

Timothy James McVeigh was a terrorist who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others, and destroyed one third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The bombing was the deadliest act of terrorism in the United States prior to the September 11 attacks. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory". Shannon is noted for having founded information theory with a landmark paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", which he published in 1948.

Cyril Richard Rescorla was a soldier, police officer, and private security specialist of British origin. He served as a British army paratrooper during the Cyprus Emergency and a United States commissioned officer in the Vietnam War. He rose to the rank of colonel in the United States Army.

Ralph Dale Earnhardt Sr. was an American professional stock car driver and team owner, who raced from 1975 to 2001 in the former NASCAR Winston Cup Series, most notably driving the No. 3 Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing. The third child of racing driver Ralph Earnhardt and Martha Earnhardt, he began his career in 1975 in the World 600. Earnhardt won a total of 76 Winston Cup races over the course of his 4 decade career, including four Winston 500s and the 1998 Daytona 500. He also earned seven Winston Cup championships, a record held with Richard Petty and Jimmie Johnson. His aggressive driving style earned him the nicknames "The Intimidator", "The Man in Black", and "Ironhead", while his success at the restrictor plate tracks of Daytona and Talladega Superspeedway also earned him the nickname, "Mr. Restrictor Plate". He is regarded as one of the greatest drivers in NASCAR history.