Gitmo prisoner says Saudi ‘royal’ involved in terrorism

An accused Al Qaeda bomb-maker who went to college in Arizona told military officials at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he believed an unnamed member of the Saudi royal family was part of an effort to recruit him for violent extremist acts before the September 11, 2001, attacks, according to a newly-released transcript.

Ghassan Abdallah al-Sharbi said a religious figure in Saudi Arabia used the term “your highness” during a telephone conversation with a man, just before urging al Sharbi to return to the US and take part in a plot against the US that would involve learning to fly a plane.

The September 11 commission found there was no evidence to indicate that the Saudi government as an institution or Saudi senior officials individually had supported the attacks, and the kingdom’s government has consistently denied it had any role in the plot.

It was early 2001, and al-Sharbi had only recently returned from the United States, where he had taken some flight school courses in Phoenix with two men who would become hijackers in the 9/11 attacks.

His statement adds to a list of suggestive but hardly definitive clues about possible involvement by members of the Saudi establishment in the September 11 attacks, in which 17 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the al-Sharbi transcript. In the past, the Saudis have pointed to the 9/11 Commission, FBI investigations and other probes that found no Saudi government or royal family involvement in the attacks.