Saudi-West enmity was Laden goal

Dubai : Osama Bin Laden, the world’s former most wanted man for terrorism charges, was set on using Saudi citizens to destroy relations between the west and the east, a newspaper quoted officials in Riyadh, London and Washington DC. “There is no doubt that he deliberately chose Saudi citizens for the 9/11 plot,” a British intelligence officer told British daily the Guardian. The intelligence officer said that Bin Laden “was convinced” that he was going to turn the west against Saudi Arabia. The former head of Saudi intelligence between 1977 and September 1, 2001, Prince Turki Al Faisal, also said his intelligence agency knew that something “spectacular” was about to happen to the Americans, British, French and Arabs just months before 9/11, the report said.

According to the prince, the Al Qaeda leader had developed a political attitude in 1990 when he wanted to evict the communists from South Yemen. This happened after Bin Laden travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation. However, according to Bin Laden’s mother, Alia Ghanem, he was a shy boy who was academically capable and only became radicalised in his early 20s while studying in university.

Speaking for the first time, she told the Guardian that he was brainwashed at university. While at university, Bin Laden met Abdullah Azzam who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Azzam became Bin Laden’s spiritual adviser after he exiled from Saudi Arabia. Since the 9/11 attack in 2001, Bin Laden has been a major target of the US with a $25 million bounty on his head. He was killed in May, 2011, inside a private residential compound in Pakistan during a covert US operation.