Saudi official suspected of links to 9/11 is identified by accident

THE FBI has accidentally identified a Saudi diplomat it believes had links to the terrorists behind the September 11 attacks, confirming for the first time that US authorities suspected Riyadh’s Washington embassy was involved in the atrocity.

In a court filing responding to the families of September 11 victims, who claim in a lawsuit Saudi Arabia is responsible for the attacks, the FBI apparently forgot to blank out a reference to Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah.

Mr Jarrah was assigned to Saudi Arabia’s embassy from 1999 to 2000 in Washington DC, and the US authorities believe that he oversaw assistance given to two al-Qa’ida terrorists as they settled in the US before the attack.

The two al-Qa’ida members – Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi – went on to hijack an American Airlines plane and kill 125 people after crashing into the Pentagon.

It is the first time that the FBI has publicly confirmed, albeit by accident, that it suspected a link between the Saudi embassy in Washington and the September 11 hijackers.

The court document was filed by Jill Sanborn, the assistant director of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division, and was alluding to findings in a heavily redacted FBI report when it mentioned Mr Jarrah.

The 2012 report identified two other Saudi men – Fahad al-Thumairy and Omar al-Bayoumi – who were suspected of assisting the hijackers, but it did not name Mr Jarrah, who the FBI suspects was the “third man” involved.

“This shows there is a complete government cover-up of the Saudi involvement,” a spokesman for the victims’ families, Brett Eagleson, told Yahoo News, which first broke thestory.( © Daily Telegraph, London)