Exposing Saudi government's intrusive role in the 9/11 terror attack on US soil, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has mistakenly revealed the name of a Saudi embassy official who is suspected to have supported the al-Qaida hijackers.
Believed to the biggest and deadliest terror attack on the US soul, the 9/11 was planned and executed by slain al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Members of the terror outfit hijacked two airliners and slammed them into New York's World Trade Centre, killing 2,753 people. The attackers crashed a third hijacked plane in Pentagon just outside of Washington, D.C while the fourth crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Who is Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah ?
A declaration filed by an FBI official, in response to a lawsuit by the families of the 9/11 victims, named Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, a Saudi Arabia official of helping the perpetrators in the 9/11 attacks. The documents were unsealed last week.
According to Yahoo News, who was first to discover the goof up in the unsealed documents, al-Jarrah's name was mentioned in the documents filed by Jill Sanborn, the assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division.
"I have been advised that with regard to Defendant the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia...Plaintiffs allege that its agents and employees directly and knowingly assisted the hijackers and plotters who carried out the 9/11 attacks," Sanborn wrote in the document.
Al-Jarrah, who is now believed to be in Saudi Arabia, was a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official posted in the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and 2000. He was in charge of supervising the activities of Ministry of Islamic Affairs employees at Saudi-funded mosques and Islamic centers in the US, according to the report.
The publication further reported that the authorities believed that Al-Jarrah ordered two people, Fahad al-Thumairy, a cleric, and Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi agent, to help Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two of the hijackers settle in the US in January 2000 ahead of the 2001 attacks. It was Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar who hijacked the American Airlines plane which flew into the Pentagon, killing 125 people.
When contacted by Yahoo News, the Justice Department, the officials notified the court and withdrew the FBI's declaration from the public docket. "The document was incorrectly filed in this case," the docket now reads, said the report.
Al-Jarrah is the 'mysterious third man' identified by US officials
In the unsealed declaration, Sanborn referred to a 2012 report, which even though majorly edited, spoke about two people having possibly links with the Saudi government. While al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi were interrogated by the US officials, the name of the third man, believed to be a high-ranking government official in Riyadh, was redacted," reported Yahoo News.
The recent declaration is the first public confirmation of the involvement of Saudi government in the 9/11 attack, an accusation denied by the authorities.
Last year in September, the identity of the mysterious third man was disclosed to the lawyers for the 9/11 families. However, they were gagged by a protective order which forbade them publicly disclosing the name of the Saudi official.
Speaking to Yahoo, Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the 9/11 families whose father was killed in the attacks, called the revelation, a giant screw-up. "This shows there is a complete government cover-up of the Saudi involvement. It demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that's coming from the Saudi Embassy to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [in Los Angeles] to the hijackers," said Eagleson, who is part of a lawsuit accusing Saudi Arabia of lending support to the attackers.
