(Washington Post) Susan Schmidt - On Aug. 20, 2001, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, soon to be named a minister of the Saudi government and put in charge of its two holy mosques, arrived in the U.S. to meet with local fundamentalist Sunni Muslim leaders. His journey was to include meetings and contacts with officials of several Saudi-sponsored charities dedicated to the spread of Wahhabism that have since been accused of links to terrorist groups, including the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. During the 1990s, Hussayen was a director of the SAAR Foundation, whose northern Virginia offices were raided in 2002 for suspected terrorist financing. Backed by money from Saudi Arabia, Wahhabis have built or taken over hundreds of mosques in North America and opened branches of Saudi universities in the U.S. for the training of imams as part of the effort to spread their beliefs, which are intolerant of Christianity, Judaism, and even other strains of Islam. On the night of Sept. 10, 2001, Hussayen stayed at a Herndon, Va., hotel that also housed three of the Saudi hijackers who would slam an aircraft into the Pentagon the next day, though there is no evidence that he had contact with them. After the attack, FBI agent Michael Gneckow interviewed Hussayen and his wife, but the interview was cut short when Hussayen "feigned a seizure, prompting the agents to take him to a hospital, where the attending physicians found nothing wrong with him." The agent recommended that Hussayen "should not be allowed to leave until a follow-up interview could occur," but on Sept. 19, the day air travel resumed, Hussayen and his wife took off for Saudi Arabia.
2003-10-02 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive