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Source: Persian Gulf wealth backing terrorists
August 14, 1996
Web posted at: 1:45 p.m. EDT (1745 GMT)(CNN) -- Wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries are involved in financing terrorists who attack Americans and Israelis, U.S. government sources told CNN Wednesday.
U.S. intelligence agencies are checking the activities of Osama Bin Laden, a member of a wealthy Saudi family who was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 and who finances a host of hard-line groups from Egypt to Algeria. Bin Laden has lived in Sudan for the past five years.
Officials in several countries, including the United States, say Bin Laden's money, as well as money he has raised, paid for guerrilla attacks in Europe, Africa and the Middle East against Americans and other Westerners.
Khaled al-Fauwaz, a spokesman for the Advice and Reformation Committee in London, with which Bin Laden is associated, dismissed the charges as "rubbish."
But in a document made public earlier this year, the U.S. State Department called Bin Laden "one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world."
It linked him to guerrilla training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan and said he supported a group that tried to bomb American servicemen in Yemen in 1992.
The document said in the three years before Yousef was charged in the World Trade Center bombing, he lived in a Pakistan guest house paid for by Bin Laden.
The Saudi militants who killed five Americans in November in a Riyadh bombing said in their confessions that they had been influenced by Bin Laden's thinking.
Former and current U.S. officials were quoted by The New York Times on Wednesday as saying they believe businessmen in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates fed funds to Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. Yousef is accused of being the mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993 and a plot to blow up 11 U.S. jets.
Philip Wilcox, head of the State Department's counter-terrorism office, told Congress recently that the Palestinian fundamentalist groups Hamas and Islamic Holy War receive significant support from individuals in the Gulf as well as in the United States.
Some contributors believe that they are underwriting legitimate charitable organizations. Others give money to radical groups knowingly, through secret channels, Wilcox said.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Related story:
- FBI chief: U.S. 'under attack' by terrorists - August 1, 1996 Sheik gets life sentence in terror trial - January 1, 1996
Related sites:
- Counter-terrorism information (U.S. State Dept.)
- The Counter-Terrorism Page
- Osama Bin Laden (Time Magazine profile)
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