Osama bin Laden used Saudi people for the 9/11 attacks to destroy US-Saudi relations, insisted Mohammed bin Salman at the White House, as the families of the victims pressed for accountability from the visiting Saudi Crown Prince. Saudi Arabia is doing its best not to let it happen again, he assured the Americans, with the survivors still furious over his presence at the Oval Office. Laden, a Saudi national, was the founder of the al-Qaeda terrorist group that carried out four coordinated attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people.
Salman was cornered by reporters over the 9/11 attacks and the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi when he and President Donald Trump addressed the media after unveiling a civilian nuclear deal and the sale of F-35 jets. He claimed that the 9/11 attacks were a ploy to harm the US-Saudi ties, and anyone who believes in that is helping to fulfill Laden’s purpose.
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“I feel painful about the families of my wife and I that live in America. But we must focus on reality. Based on CIA documents, Osama Bin Laden used Saudi people at that event for one main purpose—to destroy this relation, to destroy the American-Saudi relation. That’s the purpose of 9-11. So, whoever buys that, that means they are helping Osama bin Laden’s purpose of destroying this relation. He knows that strong relation between America and Saudi Arabia is bad for extremism. It’s bad for terrorism,” said Prince Salman.
We must prove him wrong and continue to build our relationship, the Crown Prince asserted, with President Trump by his side. “It’s critical in the safety of the world.”
Salman called 9/11 a “huge mistake” and assured that the Saudi administration is working to ensure that it doesn’t repeat.
“It’s really painful to hear (about) anyone who has been losing his life for, you know, no real purpose or not in a legal way. It’s been painful for us in Saudi Arabia. We did all the right steps of investigation, et cetera, in Saudi Arabia, and we’ve improved our system to be sure that nothing happened like that. It’s painful and a huge mistake. We are doing our best that this doesn’t happen again,” he added.
Read: “Khashoggi’s Killing Destroyed My Life”: Widow As Saudi Prince Meets Trump
Meanwhile, Trump lashed out at a reporter when asked about Khashoggi’s killing as he wooed the Saudi royal at the White House. “He (Salman) knew nothing about it,” he defended him. This, despite a US intelligence assessment finding in 2021 that Salman had ordered the hit. Salman described the killing as “painful.”
Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a fierce critic of the kingdom, was killed inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, sending the US-Saudi ties into a tailspin, with the US agencies determining Prince Salman as the mastermind of the murder. The Prince denies his involvement in the controversial episode.