Although the official US narrative on the September 11, 2001 attacks does not give away the real perpetrators behind the operation, it can be safely assumed that “Wahhabi” elements from Saudi Arabia provided direct support to them, says an analyst in Virginia.
Keith Preston, director of the attackthesystem.com, made the remarks while discussing new evidence in a lawsuit that holds Saudi Arabia responsible for the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people 16 years ago.
The lawsuit alleges that the Saudi embassy in Washington paid for two Saudi nationals, living undercover in the US as students, to fly from the city of Phoenix to Washington “in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks” two years before their occurrence, the New York Post reported on Saturday.
Pointing to the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, Preston told Press TV on Sunday that none of the attackers could have completed their “complex” mission without financial support originating from their country.
“Now, it makes perfect sense that there were elements within the Saudi government itself that were involved in the provision of the funding for this activity because of the fact that we do know that the Wahhabist movement has a great many sympathizers within the Saudi government,” he said.
“It is also clear that the hijackers from the September 11, 2001 adhered to the same ideology as well,” he added.
Citing FBI documents, the lawsuit said the Saudi students — Mohammed al-Qudhaeein and Hamdan al-Shalawi — were both members of “the kingdom’s network of agents in the US,” had received training at the camps run by the a-Qaeda militant group in Afghanistan, and were in “frequent contact” with Saudi officials while in the US.
In a November 1999 America West flight to Washington, the Saudi students reportedly tried multiple times to gain access to the cockpit of the plane.
Consequently, the pair were taken into custody following an emergency flight landing in Ohio, but later the FBI decided not to pursue prosecution.
Meanwhile, the FBI confirmed that the Saudi embassy had paid for the students’ tickets for the pre-9/11 “dry run.”
Preston ruled out the possibility of there being “individual donors” who provided those behind the attacks with the necessary resources without being connected to “systems of power in any particular location.”
The analyst said the heavily redacted US documents on 9/11 did not help in identifying the real perpetrators behind the attacks.