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Sept. 11 Victim Families Want
$116 Trillion From Alleged Terror Backers
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Relatives of people who died in the September 11 attacks are suing members of the royal Saudi family as well as the Sudanese government
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WASHINGTON,
August 29 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Around 1000 relatives
of September 11 victims who have filed a massive $116 trillion lawsuit
against alleged supporters of the September 11 terrorists are set
request a freeze the defendants’ U.S. assets, one of their lawyers
said Wednesday, August 28.
“We
will do everything, including asking Congress, to block the Saudi
suspects’ assets, which, in the event of a judgment in our favor,
will be used to compensate the families of the victims,”
Jean-Charles Brisard, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, told Agence
France-Presse (AFP).
Brisard
is the co-author of a controversial French book that claims the
September 11 attacks were a preemptive strike triggered by the U.S.
President George W. Bush administration’s military plan to permit
Unocal Corp. to build pipelines across Afghanistan.
The
book also claims that Saudi Arabia played as big a role in the spread
of what he calls “Islamic terrorism” as did the Taliban.
The
relatives, who lost loved ones in the September 11 attacks on August
15 announced they were suing three members of the Saudi royal family,
the government of Sudan, eight Islamic charities and several Gulf
banks for allegedly financing Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network,
which has been accused by the U.S. for being responsible for the
attacks.
“We
will leave them high and dry, their bankrollers broke and bereft,”
the Los Angeles Times quoted William Doyle, whose son worked in
the World Trade Center, as saying.
However,
the U.S. government is “conducting its own effort to freeze the
assets of businesses and charities that support terrorism. But the
lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia,
could complicate the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and
snarl relations with Saudi Arabia,” the LA Times said.
The
team of lawyers will first petition a U.S. court, and at the same time
are working on legislation to be considered by Congress at the opening
of its next session, Brisard said.
The
lawyer did not rule out the possibility of a link between the suit and
rumored massive withdrawals of Saudi investments in the United States,
which several top Saudi officials have denied.
“It’s
a sign of their guilt,” Brisard, who was part of the legal team
which filed action against Libya in the Lockerbie Pan Am Flight 103
disaster, claimed
The
LA Times said that the lawsuit claims the “former chief of
the Saudi Secret Services, Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Saud, helped
broker a 1998 deal in which Saudi Arabia agreed not to seek the
extradition of bin Laden and other a-Qaeda members from Afghanistan,
or the closure of terrorist camps there, in return for bin Laden’s
agreement not to use the infrastructure in Afghanistan to undermine
the Saudi government.”
The
lawsuit also says that “since 1994 Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz
al-Saud, a brother of King Fahd, has donated at least $6 million to
charities that provided financing to al-Qaeda,” the paper continued.
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Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud’s donations to charities have been called into question by the lawsuit |
“A
third member of the royal family, Mohammed al-Faisal al-Saud, is cited
as chairman of firms that owned shares of a Sudanese bank that
allegedly supported bin Laden’s activities. The lawsuit also claims
that Prince Mohammed is also the former chairman of a Swiss charity
that is ‘involved in al-Qaeda financing through several
subsidiaries’,” the LA Times reported.
Commenting
on this lawsuit, Abdurrahman El-Amoudy, the President of the American
Muslim Council said that the lawsuit was “an extortion attempt on
the Saudis.”
Meanwhile,
Pakistani newspaper, the Dawn, said Thursday, August 29, that a
campaign targeting Islamic charities in the United States was launched
after September 11.
Many
of these charities were closed down and their assets frozen. This
campaign was later widened to include charitable organizations in
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the UAE, the Dawn
reported.
“This
is not the first time that the United States has targeted Arab and
Islamic charities,” Joseph Abboud, the author of the Dawn
article said. “These organizations have been playing a major role in
building bridges between Muslims in various countries by providing aid
and relief where they are most needed, as well as by helping the
wealthy channel their donations to worthy causes.”
“During
the last two decades, Islamic charities were a thorn in the eyes of
the West, especially the Church-run charities that had hitherto
monopolized aid to Asia and Africa,” Abboud continued.
“The
real aim of the campaign targeting Islamic charities, supporters say,
is to deprive the Gulf states of effective tools to provide
humanitarian aid, thus restoring the monopoly of Western
organizations,” Abboud said.
However,
some Gulf intellectuals suggest that Church-run Western charities have
a longer history of supporting ‘terror’. “They point to the
various insurgences and separatists movements that have been funded,
both overtly and covertly, by Western NGOs without attracting any
criticism for exceeding their humanitarian remit,” Abboud wrote.
Abboud
cited two examples of this, pointing out that “the support of the
World Council of Churches to southern Sudanese rebels, as well as the
support to them in Nigeria aided the secessionist movement in Biafra.
“Other
Western humanitarian organizations used the umbrella of relief work to
provide material aid to secessionists in Northern Ireland and East
Timor,” Abboud said
However,
despite the widespread violence, no one called for the Church-oriented
aid to be suspended.
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