Posted on 10/07/2001 2:08:15 PM PDT by captain11
Sunday Oct. 7, 2001; 10:24 a.m. EDT Bin Laden's New York Niece Tipped to Attack? The high-living daughter of one of Osama bin Laden's brothers, who had an apartment just a mile from the Twin Tower blast site, unexpectedly left the country just weeks before her uncle gave the order to attack the U.S. "Wealthy 26-year-old party girl Wafah bin Laden lived in the lap of luxury, renting a huge $6,000-a-month loft in lower Manhattan that had a picture-postcard view of the Twin Towers," reports the National Enquirer this week. But when the tabloid sought an interview with Wafah, she was nowhere to be found. "Wafah's in Europe," her house-sitting friend explained. "She left a few weeks before the (the attacks), going to Switzerland," another source told the tabloid. The curious timing of Wafah's departure left her friend dumbfounded. "It makes you wonder whether (Wafah) had any advance word of what was coming down," she said. "In the weeks before, she was busy cutting a record at her own expense at a Manhattan recording studio," the friend said. "While she is a college student in New York, she is eager to be a pop star." The bin Laden chum said Wafah had spent "an outrageous amount of money" trying to get her record produced. But she fled the city at the moment she seemed to be on the on the verge of accomplishing that goal. "Why she left town before finishing it is a mystery," the friend explained. The bin Laden niece wouldn't have been the only family member to get a heads-up on the single most dastardly peacetime attack in world history. Just before Wafah's uncle gave the order to incinerate the Twin Towers, he called his stepmother Al-Kalifa bin Laden in Syria. "In two days you’re going to hear big news, and you're not going to hear from me for a while," he told her. The call was reportedly intercepted by a foreign intelligence service, which later shared details with U.S. authorities. Still other bin Laden family members apparently knew of the warning, confirming the Sept. 9 call in interviews with investigators. "(A senior foreign) official, speaking on the condition of not being named, said the account (of the call) was obtained through an interrogation of Mr. bin Laden's extended family in Saudi Arabia," the New York Times reported Tuesday. News of the last minute contacts between Osama and one or more relatives flies in the face of bin Laden family claims that they had "disowned" him and had him stripped of Saudi citizenship in 1994. The bin Laden family is one of the most powerful and wealthy families in Saudi Arabia. It's unclear whether any of the bin Ladens who knew of Osama's warning were among the 24 family members who were evacuated from the U.S. a week after the attacks at the request of Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The FBI was apparently ordered to let bin Laden's relatives escape despite growing concerns that they may have known something about his plans. A source at Boston's Logan Airport, where both the bin Ladens and the terrorist hijackers departed a week apart, told the Boston Globe that federal investigators were "all over" their private jet before it took off. The Justice Department has also subpoenaed the banking records of the American branch of the bin Laden family.
I never bought that crap for one second!
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