Saudi officials said they are checking records to see how money from the wife of their U.S. ambassador might have eventually gone to supporters of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In trying to calm the latest strain in their alliance with the United States, they called "crazy" any suggestion she intended to support the hijackers. According to U.S. media reports, embassy officials spent the weekend having bankers pore over the records of Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, to figure out how thousands of dollars in monthly payments from her account apparently ended up in the wrong hands, said Saudi foreign policy adviser Adel al-Jubeir.
Some of the money apparently went into the accounts of two men who U.S. officials think provided financial support to hijackers.
Many senators, including some who doubted the princess meant to help terrorists, attacked the Saudi government on Sunday's television talk shows for what they saw as years of complicity in anti-American radicalism, AP reported.
Saudis have a history of "buying off extremism," even if only by averting their gaze from it, said Sen. Joseph Biden, outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
It's "part of a saga where the Saudis don't know, have not checked, are not nearly conscientious enough in determining whether or not a 'charity' is genuinely a charity or a front for, or a back door for, terrorists or terrorist-sympathizing organizations or individuals," Biden said on CNN.
Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer said Saudis "have played a duplicitous game, and that is they say to the terrorists, 'We'll do everything you want, just leave us alone,'" he said. "That game has got to stop."
Saudi adviser al-Jubeir said the princess sent monthly checks to a Saudi woman living in this country who sought help paying for medical treatment. Al-Jubeir said the princess sent the woman $2,000 a month; other accounts have put the figure higher. The FBI is investigating the bank transactions.
Al-Jubeir said Saudis had bank officials in Washington, starting at 3 a.m. Saturday, begin going through the princess' electronic transactions, which include hundreds or thousands of payments to expatriate Saudi charities and citizens.
"That's when we discovered that some of the checks were endorsed to third parties," he said.
"To think that Princess Haifa, whose father was murdered by a terrorist in 1995, who's a mother, who's a grandmother, would write checks to people who give it to terrorists is crazy," he added.
Al-Jubeir said Saudi Arabia was working closely with the United States in the broader hunt for members of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. “I don’t believe that there are any two governments that are cooperating more closely than your government and my government on this matter,” Al-Jubeir said.
Al-Jubeir said the Saudis had thought the money trail issue was closed. “So we find it surprising that now out of the US Congress they repackage this and push it as new evidence, which leads me to believe that the people who are behind this are more interested in scoring political brownie points than they are in arriving at the truth,” he said. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
