Hijackers In Same Hotel As Saudi Minister (9-10-2001)

A senior Saudi Arabian official, now minister for the holy places, stayed at the same hotel as three September 11 hijackers the night before the suicide attacks.

American investigators are trying to make sense of the disclosure that Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al-Hussayen, who returned to Saudi Arabia shortly after the attacks, stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia.

Three of the attackers stayed at the hotel that night and crashed a plane into the Pentagon the following day.

His nephew's American lawyer, David Nevin, denied any sinister aspects to the older man's travels.

Mr Nevin told The Washington Post that the Saudi minister was a backer of Saudi charities abroad and said his visit to the United States was "utterly and completely innocuous and without connection to anything improper".

Mr Hussayen became president of the affairs of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, the two most sacred sites in Islam, five months after the attacks. Sources said he was already a prominent figure in the world of Saudi-funded charities.

An extended business trip taken by Mr Hussayen in the United States and Canada in the run-up to the attacks is under scrutiny by agents and prosecutors nationwide.

Mr Hussayen was interviewed by FBI agents who went to the hotel after the attacks. According to allegations in an FBI file, he "feigned a seizure, prompting the agents to take him to a hospital, where the attending physicians found nothing wrong with him".

FBI agents recommended that the Saudi should not be allowed to leave until he was questioned further, but as soon as flights resumed on Sept 19, Mr Hussayen and his wife flew home.

He is not now suspected of breaking any laws and there is no evidence that he met the hijackers at the Virginia hotel.

But investigators are pooling what they know about his trip to North America, during which he allegedly visited or contacted several Saudi-sponsored charities now accused of links to terrorist groups. There is no suggestion that he knew of any such links.

US prosecutors say Mr Hussayen was a financial backer of a Michigan-based group, the Islamic Assembly of North America, which is accused of disseminating the teachings of two Saudi clerics who advocate violence against the United States.

His nephew, Sami Omar Hussayen, a computer student, is in federal detention in Idaho on charges of visa fraud, accused of failing to disclose his role as an internet webmaster for IANA.

US court filings say the younger Hussayen administered an internet site for IANA that expressly advocated suicide attacks and using airliners as weapons. IANA received about £2 million from abroad since 1995, court papers allege, including £60,000 from Saleh al-Hussayen.

Saudi envoys confirmed Mr Hussayen's high rank to reporters this week and told The Wall Street Journal that they were willing to make him available to the Justice Department. That offer was welcomed yesterday by Kim Lindquist, a US assistant attorney working on the federal prosecution of the younger Hussayen in Boise, Idaho.

Mr Lindquist said: "We're investigating the IANA. We have the money flowing to the IANA through the nephew from the uncle. We have the uncle visiting the United States just prior to September 11, and upon his return to the East Coast he's in the same hotel as the hijackers. According to FBI agents he feigns a seizure. It is something that we cannot ignore."

Mr Lindquist said he was unwilling to "take the extra step" of linking Saudi officials to the September 11 hijackings. "But it raises the eyebrows," he said.

His journeys and contacts are seen as a "road map" of how Saudi money has poured into the United States in support of Wahhabism, the puritanical and intolerant form of Islam backed by the Saudi royal family.

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With Friends Like These

EVER SINCE the 9-11 attacks, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Saudi Embassy in Washington has been providing top-flight defense lawyers free of charge for any Saudi citizen detained as part of the Justice Department’s crackdown on suspected terrorists.

“That has been the policy since day one,” said Muddassir H. Siddiqui, the former chief counsel for the Saudi Embassy. He said he personally arranged for defense lawyers for “hundreds” of Saudi suspects detained by federal agents after the 9-11 attacks.

Siddiqui, who left the embassy last year, said the unusual Saudi legal-defense program was ordered by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the veteran Saudi ambassador to the United States, based on instructions sent from Riyadh immediately after the attacks. Siddiqui insists that Bandar also directed Saudi officials and the defense lawyers they hired to “cooperate” with the Justice Department on terror-related investigations.

But that contention is now being questioned at high levels of the Justice Department. In a growing number of recent cases, FBI agents are intensely investigating suspected links between Saudi nationals in the U.S. and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network as well as other international terrorist groups. The growing awareness that the Saudi Embassy is providing targets of the Justice Department probes with free lawyers has infuriated some officials.

“I find it amazing,” said one senior federal law-enforcement official. “It’s outrageous, really. If they were a corporation and doing the same thing, I think we would have to think about whether to charge them. It certainly doesn’t sound like cooperation.”

The issue has come sharply into focus in the recent case of Sami Al-Hussayen, a University of Idaho graduate student who has been charged with visa fraud as part of a widening Justice Department investigation into an obscure Saudi-funded charity, the Islamic Assembly in North America, in Ann Arbor, Mich., with suspected links to associates of Osama bin Laden.

Federal prosecutors in Boise charged that Al-Hussayen, a Saudi national who had been studying computer science on a government-paid scholarship, secretly served as a conduit for hundreds of thousands of dollars to IANA and operated a number of IANA Web sites that openly advocated violence, jihad and suicide bombings against the United States.

The case, some federal sources say, has raised more than a few eyebrows among federal investigators because of the alleged role of a prominent Saudi cleric with high-level connections to the Saudi government. (The cleric also happens to be Sami Al-Hussayen’s uncle.) In a March 11 courtroom hearing, prosecutors charged that the cleric—identified as Saleh Abdel Rahman Al-Hussayen, the chief administrator of the Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina—was the source of about $100,000 that was funneled through his nephew’s bank accounts to IANA.

Even more tantalizing was testimony from an FBI agent that the cleric Al-Hussayen had flown to the United States in the summer of 2001 and, on the evening of Sept. 10, stayed in the same Marriott Residence Hotel in Herndon, Va., where three of the terrorists who hijacked the plane that crashed into the Pentagon were also spending the night.

Immediately after the attacks, FBI agents sought to question Al-Hussayen. But the interview “came to an abrupt end when the uncle feigned a seizure, prompting the agents to take him to a hospital where the attending physicians found nothing wrong with him,” according to a copy of an FBI affidavit released as part of a hearing on the nephew Al-Hussayen’s case.

The high-level cleric Al-Hussayen has since left the country. But federal prosecutors are intrigued by the possible links to the 9-11 terrorists—one reason they have been aggressively pursuing the case against the cleric’s nephew.

When they recently sought to have the nephew indefinitely detained pending trial, however, they were thwarted by a veteran Boise defense lawyer who got crucial last-minute assistance from the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

A key issue in the two-day detention hearing was whether Al-Hussayen was still receiving scholarship funding from the Saudi government to pursue his graduate studies at the University of Idaho. The assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the case, Kim Lindquist, presented testimony from an FBI agent that Al-Hussayen’s scholarship had been cut off at the end of last year. That lessened Al-Hussayen’s ties to the community and made him more of a flight risk, Lindquist argued.

“That was a critical factor” in the detention hearing, Lindquist told NEWSWEEK.

But the next day, Al-Hussayen’s lawyer, David Nevin, showed up in court with a document that seemed to directly undercut Lindquist’s case: a financial statement faxed overnight from the Saudi Embassy that showed that Al-Hussayen’s funding had been extended to May 31, 2003. The new financial statement caught Lindquist and the rest of the prosecution team off guard. “We were surprised to see that,” said Lindquist. “It’s clear to me that some strings definitely got pulled there.” The evidence that Al-Hussayen was still receiving Saudi scholarship aid also apparently helped persuade the judge not to order Al-Hussayen’s detention. “It was a huge issue,” said Lindquist.

In the end, the setback was hardly fatal to the government. Although the federal judge ruled that Al-Hussayen could be released until his trial, he is still being detained by U.S. immigration officials. But the surprise courtroom maneuver has raised questions about the degree to which the defense lawyer is working with the Saudi Embassy to undermine the Justice Department’s case. As it happens, Nevin is one of the most widely respected criminal-defense lawyers in Boise. (Among his achievements was winning the acquittal of Kevin Harris, the friend of federal fugitive Randy Weaver, who had been accused of murdering a federal marshal during the notorious 1992 siege of Weaver’s compound at Ruby Ridge.) He declined to confirm to NEWSWEEK who was paying him to represent the Saudi national. But a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy confirmed that it was common practice for the embassy to provide such lawyers to any of its citizens facing legal difficulties in the United States.

SADDAM’S MONEY

By one U.S. government estimate, Saddam Hussein and his regime skimmed as much as $2.3 billion worth of illegal kickbacks from the United Nations-sponsored “oil for food” program since 1997. What happened was that Saddam’s regime demanded that foreign oil companies participating in the U.N. humanitarian program make under-the-table payments of 30 to 50 cents a barrel to secret bank accounts in Jordan and other third countries. U.S. officials and Western diplomats believe this money was then used both to enrich Saddam and his inner circle and to finance secret Iraqi efforts to build or buy weapons of mass destruction.

So which oil firms have been playing in the Iraqi extortion scheme?

U.S. Treasury officials dearly want to find out, having launched a worldwide search for Saddam’s money. (The U.S. wants to use the proceeds to help rebuild Iraq after the war.) But figuring out answers is not quite so easy. U.S. oil companies and most other Western firms adamantly deny making any such dubious payments. But the trail has lead to a number of obscure entities in tax havens like Switzerland and the pocket principality of Liechtenstein. These firms are, for the most part, shrouded in mystery, with company operators taking full advantage of local bank-secrecy laws to avoid public scrutiny not only of their finances, but even of basic facts about the identities of the people behind specific companies. Actual or would-be big players in the oil-for-food program in the last couple of years, according to diplomatic and law-enforcement sources, include Liechtenstein companies named Alcon Petroleum, Napex A.G., Fenar Petroleum, Oilar Establishment and Tradetechno Ltd. Public records relating to the foundation and operation of these companies generally list only the names and addresses of Liechtenstein businessmen called “fiduciaries,” or company-formation agents; under what used to be Liechtenstein’s world-class bank secrecy laws, until recently such agents could set up companies without have to reveal who the firms’ real owners and operators were.

Oil-industry trade publications have suggested that some of the Liechtenstein companies involved in oil-for-food deals are fronts for larger Russian oil companies that don’t want to be seen paying kickbacks to Saddam and Co. But even hard documentation on the front companies’ activities is not very revealing. A case study: NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of a secret, U.N.-approved oil-for-food contract, dated June 2002, between the Liechtenstein company Fenar Petroleum and Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization, the Iraqi national oil company that U.S. officials say is tightly controlled by Saddam Hussein and his son Uday. The contract lists as Fenar Petroleum’s address the office of a “fiduciary” in Liechtenstein. But the company’s phone numbers are all in London, and the contract is signed on behalf of Fenar by someone named Musbah Ladki, whose name appears nowhere on Fenar’s official corporate-registration papers.

Nobody answers Fenar’s London phones. But NEWSWEEK traced Fenar’s phone numbers to an office building in a swank London neighborhood near Harrods department store and across from Hyde Park. The building’s list of tenants included two Swiss-based oil companies with well-known Russian connections and an office of Algeria’s national oil company. But a security guard at the building told a visiting NEWSWEEK reporter he had never heard of Fenar Petroleum or Musbah Ladki. A representative of the Algerian oil company also said she had never heard of Fenar or Ladki. The security guard said that representatives of the two Swiss oil companies with offices in the building usually worked in Geneva and only visited their London office occasionally to hold business meetings. Investigators who have tried to untangle some of these convoluted oil deals say that loose U.N. scrutiny and bank-secrecy restrictions in places like Switzerland and Liechtenstein still make figuring out who is really behind a particular deal almost impossible. The government of Liechtenstein is so concerned that it will be blamed for laundering Saddam’s illicit oil profits that the mini-state’s prime minister, Otmar Hasler, late last year declared that Liechtenstein had stopped approving new oil-for-food deals. “Under no circumstances will the Liechtenstein government tolerate any circumvention or misuse of the program,” Hasler told NEWSWEEK in a written statement.

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