Saudi official: Report shows government didn't fund al Qaeda
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The panel investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks has "vindicated" Saudi Arabia by determining that neither its government nor senior officials financed al Qaeda, Saudi foreign policy adviser Adel al-Jubeir said.
A report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as the 9/11 panel is formally known, said there is "no evidence" the Saudis gave money to al Qaeda, which is blamed for the attacks.
"We are very pleased, because it vindicates what we have been saying all along," al-Jubeir told reporters Saturday. It is unfortunate that Congress had to spend millions of dollars in order to pursue outrageous charges."
Al-Jubeir spoke a day after Saudi forces killed four al Qaeda militants and arrested 12 suspects, according to the Saudi government.
"This was a major blow to al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia," said al-Jubeir. "We believe that with this blow to al Qaeda we have substantially weakened their organization. We will continue to pursue them with vigor until we eliminate them from our midst."
The Saudi raid on the terrorists followed the kidnapping and beheading of Paul Johnson, an American engineer working in Saudi Arabia. (Full story)
Saudi officials had vehemently denied the 9/11 hijackers received any help from their government. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
Saudi-related parts of a classified report by a joint congressional inquiry into the attacks were deleted from a copy that was made public last July, raising many questions about what role -- if any -- Riyadh had in the attacks.
Nearly 30 deleted pages of the report have never been made public. The report was the result of a 10-month joint investigation by House and Senate intelligence committees looking into intelligence and security lapses leading to the attacks. The report was written after an investigation that included 5,000 interviews and a review of nearly 1 million documents.
But al-Jubeir said the more recent commission was an improvement on the House-Senate panel.
"Here we have an independent commission that is much more serious, that had much greater resources, much greater access to information saying categorically there was no Saudi government involvement or involvement by Saudi princes or Saudi government officials in the financing of Al Qaeda or the 9/11 hijackers," al-Jubeir said.
"I personally hope that some of the people who pushed these outrageous allegations and who had no qualms about maligning a country or individuals would be honest and honorable enough to perhaps stand up and retract some of the things they had said," he said.
