Patrons of al-Qaeda in 1990s
A former al-Qaeda operative imprisoned in the United States has told lawyers that members of the Saudi royal family provided millions of dollars to the terrorist group in the 1990s, press.tv reported.
Zacarias Moussaoui, a 46-year-old French citizen, made the revelations in a testimony filed in a New York federal court on Tuesday by lawyers for victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks who accuse Riyadh of sponsoring al-Qaeda.
Moussaoui said a list of al-Qaeda donors that he created during Osama bin Laden’s tenure included some “extremely famous” Saudi officials, including Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the US; and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a famous Saudi billionaire businessman.
“Shaykh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money because … who is to be listened to or who contribute to – to the jihad,” said Moussaoui, who was given life sentence in 2006 after he admitted terror charges following the 9/11 attacks.
He said he met in Kandahar, Afghanistan, an official from the Saudi embassy in Washington to discuss a terrorist attack inside the United States. He said he was supposed to meet the same official again in Washington to find a location “suitable to launch a stinger attack” on Air Force One.
Moussaoui, who is serving life in prison in Florence, Colorado, where he has been held since 2006, also stated bin Laden used to directly deal with senior Saudi officials, including Prince Turki.
The Saudi embassy in Washington denied the allegations, calling Moussaoui “a deranged criminal whose own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent.” It said that Moussaoui’s claims appeared aimed at damaging Saudi-US ties.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists but many analysts say it was a false-flag operation and that bin Laden was just a bogeyman for the US military-industrial complex.
They believe rogue elements within the US government orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to boost the US economy and advance the Zionist agenda.
In an interview with Press TV in April last year, American scholar Dr. Kevin Barrett said that the intelligence agencies of the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia played important roles in planning and orchestrating the September 11 attacks.
He added that 9/11 was not a hijacking incident but a military attack. “There was in fact no hijacking in 9/11. It was a simulated hijacking and in fact it was a military attack.”
Gordon Duff, editor at Veterans Today and co-founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, has discussed the 9/11 issue in his several articles and interviews.
In one of his articles, Duff writes that Israel’s Mossad worked with the Bush administration to plan and execute the 9/11 atrocity.
In an interview with Press TV in September 2014, Duff said the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a “contrived event” secretly executed by neoconservatives in the Pentagon in cooperation with US and Israeli intelligence agencies.
“9-11 was a contrived event involving collusion between the CIA, the neocons in the Department of Defense and the Mossad,” he said.
M. Al-Ibrahim