Saudi royalty allegedly aided al-Qaeda
Date February 4, 2015 - 4:39PM
Former al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui. Photo: Reuters
Washington: In highly unusual testimony inside the US federal supermax prison, a former operative for al-Qaeda has described prominent members of Saudi Arabia's royal family as major donors to the terrorist network in the late 1990s and claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi embassy in Washington.
The al-Qaeda member, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been diagnosed as mentally ill but was found competent to stand trial on terrorism charges. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 and is held in the most secure prison in the federal system, in Florence, Colorado.
Last year, he wrote to Judge George Daniels , who is presiding over a lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia by relatives of those killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Smoke rises and debris falls after the World Trade Centre in New York was attacked on September 11, 2001. Photo: Reuters
He said he wanted to testify in the case, and after lengthy negotiations with US Justice Department officials and the federal Bureau of Prisons, a team of lawyers was permitted to enter the prison and question him for two days in October.
The Saudi embassy noted that the national September 11 commission had rejected allegations that the Saudi government or Saudi officials had funded al-Qaeda.
"Moussaoui is a deranged criminal whose own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent," an embassy statement said. "His words have no credibility."
The allegations from Moussaoui come at a sensitive time in Saudi-American relations, less than two weeks after the death of the country's long-time monarch, King Abdullah, and the succession of his brother, King Salman. There has often been tension between Saudi leaders and the Obama administration since the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the efforts to manage the region's resulting turmoil.
Moussaoui describes meeting in Saudi Arabia with Salman, then the crown prince, and other Saudi royals while delivering them letters from Osama bin Laden.
There has long been evidence that wealthy Saudis provided support for Bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction magnate, and al-Qaeda before the 2001 attacks. Saudi Arabia had worked closely with the United States to finance Islamic militants fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and al-Qaeda drew its members from militant fighters.
However, the extent and nature of Saudi involvement in al-Qaeda, and whether it extended to the planning and financing of the September 11 attacks, has long been a subject of dispute.
Moussaoui's testimony, if judged credible, provides new details of the extent and nature of that support in the pre-9/11 period. In more than 100 pages of testimony, filed in federal court in New York on Monday, he comes across as calm and largely coherent, though the plaintiffs' lawyers questioning him do not challenge his statements.
"My impression was that he was of completely sound mind, focused and thoughtful," said Sean Carter, a Philadelphia lawyer with Cozen O'Connor, who participated in the deposition on behalf of the plaintiffs.
He said the lawyers needed to get a special exemption from the "special administrative measures" that keep many convicted terrorists in federal prisons from communicating with outsiders.
The French-born Moussaoui was detained weeks before September 11 on immigration charges in Minnesota, so he was incarcerated at the time of the attacks. Earlier in 2001, he had taken flying lessons and was wired $US14,000 by an al-Qaeda cell in Germany, evidence that he might have been preparing to become one of the hijackers.
He said in the deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of donors to the group.
Among those he said he recalled listing in the database were Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the long-time Saudi ambassador to the US; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country's leading clerics.
"Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money," he said in imperfect English, "who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad."
Moussaoui said he acted as a courier for Bin Laden, carrying personal messages to prominent Saudi princes and clerics.
And he described his training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in preparation for various proposed plots.
He helped conduct an explosion of a 750-kilogram bomb as a trial run for a planned truck-bomb attack on the US embassy in London, he said, using the same weapon used in the al-Qaeda attacks in 1998 on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
He also studied the possibility of staging attacks with crop-dusting aircraft.
In addition, Moussaoui said: "We talk about the feasibility of shooting Air Force One."
New York Times
