Saleh Al-Hussayen

Name: Saleh Al-Hussayen

Nationality: Saudi

Residency: USA

Nobody really seems to be sure who he is, but he stayed in the same hotel as some of the hijackers on 9-10-2001. On Wikipedia it says he ran the SAAR foundation. Government investigators seemed to believe he was "Chief Administrator of the Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina."

### Document 17

According to FBI documents, Saleh Al-Hussayen is a Saudi Interior Ministry employee/official and may also be a prominent Saudi cleric. According to one news article, Saleh Al-Hussayen is the Chief Administrator of the Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina. An FBI affidavit notes that Saleh Al-Hussayen stayed in the same hotel as three of the hijackers on September 10, 2001. He told the FBI that he did not know the hijackers. The FBI agents interviewing him, however, believed he was being deceptive. The interview was terminated when al-Hussayen either passed out or feigned a seizure and was taken to the hospital; he then departed the country before the FBI could reinterview him. Saleh Al-Hussayen is 'also the uncle of Sami Al-Hussayen.

### Agent statement

Agents interviewed him in his hotel room. Saleh claimed he did speak English and they had to talk to his wife. The wife said they were visiting tourists, they had met Bangladeshi men and some other men and visited Detroit, Toronto and Herndon. She said she had acquired a Virginia driving licence as a souvenir. She said Saleh had a brother in Idaho but they did not visit him. When asked if Saleh was involved in the attacks she said she didnt know, which the agents found strange.

During the interview Saleh had began muttering and sweating. As agents asked about why they had moved to this hotel the behaviour became worse until he eventually had a seizure. His wife did not seem worried by it. He was taken to a hospital but released within two hours. Agents were not convinced by the explanation of why they moved hotels.

### Sami Omar

This brother/nephew in Idaho ran a website linked to Azzam.com which published fatwas from Saudi sheiks who were tied to Osama. The fatwas called for 'suicide commando missions' and were published in the summer of 2001. The website was a mujahideen news site.

### FBI

Hussayen met with IANA representatives in Ann Arbor, Mich., according to the court testimony of Idaho FBI agent Michael Gneckow. In court papers, the FBI has described Saleh Hussayen as a financial backer of IANA, an assertion confirmed by his nephew's lawyer in Idaho.

### WaPo

On Aug. 20, 2001, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, a man who would soon be named a minister of the Saudi government and put in charge of its two holy mosques, arrived in the United States to meet with some of this country's most influential fundamentalist Sunni Muslim leaders.

His journey here was to include meetings and contacts with officials of several Saudi-sponsored charities that have since been accused of links to terrorist groups, including the Illinois-based Global Relief Foundation, which was shut down by U.S. authorities last year.

He met with the creators of Islamic Web sites that U.S. authorities contend promote the views of radical Saudi clerics tied to Osama bin Laden. And among the imams on his travel schedule was a leader of a small religious center tucked into a nondescript office building in Falls Church, the same site used for a time by the spiritual leader of a group of area men indicted in June as suspected jihadists.

On the night of Sept. 10, 2001, Hussayen stayed at a Herndon hotel that also housed three of the Saudi hijackers who would slam an aircraft into the Pentagon the next day

One of the principal organizations under investigation in the United States is a group the Saudi Embassy has branded as Muslim extremists. It is the Michigan-based Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA), whose webmaster is Saleh Hussayen's nephew: Sami Omar Hussayen, a computer scientist jailed in Idaho on charges he failed to disclose his work for IANA on immigration forms.

In Northern Virginia, 11 men were indicted in June, accused of training to wage jihad with a Pakistani terrorist group. The indictment alleged that the men's spiritual leader, Ali Timimi, who has long been associated with IANA, told group members in September 2001 that the time had come for them "to . . . join the mujaheddin engaged in violent jihad.

The indictment also alleged that the men's spiritual leader, Ali Timimi, who has long been associated with IANA, told group members in September 2001 that the time had come for them "to . . . join the mujaheddin engaged in violent jihad in Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan or Indonesia" and that "American troops were legitimate targets of the jihad."

Investigators at multiple federal agencies are trying to sort out the network's seemingly innumerable links, some of which lead back to the same nondescript office building at 360 S. Washington St. in Falls Church. It is there that Timimi used to lecture at Dar al Arqam.

Idris is president of the American Open University in Fairfax, a "distance learning" center that uses the Web to promote Salafi teaching. The university has received funding from IANA, according to tax records.

Neither Idris nor others at the university responded to requests for interviews, but they were among those in the United States whom Hussayen was scheduled to see, according to sources with knowledge of his trip.

Those sources said Hussayen was also scheduled to visit officials at the Muslim World League, a multibillion-dollar, Saudi-based umbrella charity organization whose U.S. offices are at 360 S. Washington St.

Within five months of his journey, Hussayen would assume the post of general president of the Grand Mosque and the Prophet's Mosque, a position that involves him in the administrative affairs of the kingdom's charities.

Hussayen has a background in Saudi-backed charities. Virginia incorporation records show that during the 1990s, he was a director of the SAAR Foundation