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| German Terror Probe Hits Snag, As U.S., Saudi Officials Stonewall |
| 2002-12-06 |
| German law-enforcement officials have discovered potential links between the Hamburg terrorism cell that launched the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Saudi Arabia but have run into roadblocks trying to get U.S. and Saudi officials to help investigate them. What a surprise. The business card of a Saudi Arabian diplomat and phone numbers for prominent Saudi Arabian dissidents were found among the belongings of Mounir el-Motassadeq, a 28-year-old Moroccan arrested late last year in Hamburg for aiding the hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. German investigators also determined that Mr. Motassadeq called the Islamic Dar al Assima al Nahr, a Saudi Arabian organization that specializes in Islamic law, in late 2000. "It's legal to kill infidels, right? Yes. OK, Thanks." But German and U.S. records show fruitless attempts by German authorities to get help on that front over months from Saudi and U.S. authorities, stymying their efforts to follow up that information and search other links. Senior U.S. officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation acknowledged they couldn't provide all the information on Saudi connections German authorities requested. They cited longstanding legal and diplomatic agreements barring them from passing on information to third parties, and noted that they did provide 63 pieces of evidence in 1,000 pages of other information about Mr. Motassedeq. The troubles in tracking Mr. Motassadeq's Saudi ties underscore gaps in international cooperation in the global war on terrorism. His trial already has strained relations across the Atlantic, as U.S. officials have refused to allow a former member of the Hamburg cell in U.S. custody, Ramzi Binalshibh, to testify against Mr. Motassadeq. Germany, for its part, has withheld some information that could be used in a separate U.S. trial of suspected would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, because he could be subject to the death penalty. And the Saudi Arabian government has come under renewed pressure over its pursuit of terror financers in its midst. Mr. Motassadeq has been charged with more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder for his alleged role as the hijackers' logistical helper in Hamburg, where three of the four pilots had studied and lived with him. The Saudi diplomat's business card emerged as evidence this week in the Hamburg trial of Mr. Motassadeq. The other links haven't been disclosed previously. According to police records, he also had the phone numbers for several well-known Saudi dissidents: Sheik Safr al-Hawali, Sheik Salman al-Awda and Sheik Nassar al Hamd. Messrs. Hawali and Awda were jailed in the early 1990s for criticizing the Saudi government and calling for an end to U.S. military bases there. The two were released in 2000 and are still spiritual leaders among radical Muslims. Oooo, they named names. Wonder if these are the same guys that took those calls from the Russian theater? This is the second time Mr. Hawali has been linked to al Qaeda. Irish government records also list him and other Islamic scholars from Mecca as the incorporators of a defunct organization based in Dublin called Mercy International. The group, which was purported to be a charity but never legally registered as one, was used by al Qaeda in Nairobi, Kenya, for travel documents and logistics during the planning of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, according to documents and testimony from subsequent trials in New York of the bombing plotters. Germany's foreign intelligence service says in a March 8 report that the release of Mr. Hawali "was ordered by Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef Ibn Abd al-Aziz, in response to pressure by Islamic extremists, such as the Jihad al Islamiyya group, which threatened violent attacks should the imprisonment continue." It's Prince "The Jews did it" Nayef again. German investigators have been stymied in tracing calls from the Saudi numbers to Germany, which they hoped would yield information on other ties between Germany and the radical Saudi center and clerics. One question is how the Hamburg hijackers, who are widely seen as having led the Sept. 11 attacks, came into contact with the 15 Saudi men who also participated in the attacks, investigators say. Old college roommates, perhaps? On May 27, German investigators wrote to the Saudi embassy's police liaison officer, Saleh al-Harbi, for help in ascertaining how Mr. Motassadeq obtained the business card of Mohammad J. Fakihi, a Saudi diplomat and head of the Islamic department at the embassy in Berlin. "Did el-Motassadeq visit the embassy or Islamic department? On what business? Who did he come with? Did he visit the embassy more than once?" the investigators wrote in their letters to the Saudi embassy. Two weeks later, Mr. Harbi responded, according to a German document describing the phone call, and said the written request violated protocol. He asked for a more informal "verbal note" from the German foreign ministry. Mr. Harbi said that his government would provide the information within a week of the request and that embassy officials were already collecting it. German officials are still waiting for a response. Don't hold your breath. On March 12, the Germans sent the FBI an 18-page fax asking for notarized copies of bank records and other evidence needed in Mr. Motassadeq's trial. Among the requests was "the findings of the FBI concerning the following Saudi Arabian telephone numbers secured with the suspect Mr. el-Motassadeq." What followed on the fax were the clerics' phone numbers. On Oct. 2, the U.S. answered, sending the requested documents. The request for information on Mr. Motassadeq's Saudi links, however, was ignored. Another day, yet another Saudi story. Beginning to smell a policy change on our Saudi so-called friends? |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #3 infowars.com infowars.com infowars.com get the real truth |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2002-12-07 18:19:09 |
| #2 Actually, Hawali and Awdah (who still lives in Soddy) were jailed after they attended Teheran's annual terrorist meeting. Los Wahabos thought they were too friendly with the Shi-Hizbis. |
| Posted by: Born In A Taxi 2002-12-07 07:59:25 |
| #1 Three out of the four pilots, eh? No matter if there were a hundred hijackers on each plane, if none of them could fly the plane, they'd be useless. At least the article pointed out that the Krauts withheld information from us due to their concern for capital punishment. How high and mighty of them. That we withheld our info because of INTERNATIONAL agreements is so noble and oh so MULTILATERALIST of us. What? Complaining that we're not acting like a cowboy now???? |
| Posted by: Ptah 2002-12-06 14:27:59 |