Posted on 09/19/2001 3:42:16 PM PDT by lonestar45
DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi officials and media have cast doubt on the credibility of a list of 19 suspects named by U.S. investigators as suicide hijackers, saying some of them are alive and innocent.
The FBI last week identified 19 men as hijackers, including seven trained pilots, who it said commandeered the four passenger jets used in the attacks that left nearly 6,000 were dead and missing. Although the FBI list did not provide the nationalities of the suspects, Gulf officials and analysts said the family names appeared to indicate that many of them were Saudi nationals. "The haste in publishing the names of suspects in the attacks has made the media fall into the error of involving innocent people, especially Saudis, who later proved that they were innocent," said Prince Mit'eb bin Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz, deputy commander of the Saudi National Guards. The apparent errors over the names have strengthened a belief in the Gulf that the real attackers used false or stolen passports and documents.
A Saudi Foreign Ministry official said authorities in the kingdom had doubts about the list, just before Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal flew to Washington to help U.S. efforts to hunt the perpetrators of the attacks. "We have our own doubts because many of those implicated have turned out to be alive here or elsewhere," he said. Saudi newspapers have published interviews and pictures of at least five of those who appeared on the FBI list since it was released Friday.
Surely all the people named by the FBI were also on passenger manifests for one of the four planes. That would seem to close the matter right there.
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