LONDON/SAN DIEGO, 20 October — Scotland Yard police are investigating three Arabs, including a Saudi student, after receiving reports that the three had "very strong links" to Osama Bin Laden, who is considered as the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in United States.
Sources close to the Scotland Yard said the two other Arabs are an Algerian, imprisoned in southeast London, and a Frenchman of Moroccan origin, who has lived in London for about five years and is now being held in the US city of Minnesota. A senior British police officer said Scotland Yard had received requests from the FBI for assistance in more than 200 cases.
Meanwhile, American intelligence officers admitted that most of the people detained in the US after last month’s terror attacks had nothing to do with the aerial assaults. "Only less than 10 persons of the nearly 800 detainees have direct links to the perpetrators of the attacks," the FBI officers said, adding that these ten suspects were not cooperating with the authorities.
FBI agents are also investigating the mysterious disappearance of a Kuwaiti student in Houston, Texas. Shama Al-Rushaidy, the student, disappeared two weeks ago and her whereabouts are not known.Her two brothers, with whom she was living, said that she did not return from her classes at the university and were anxiously awaiting her return. Her brothers had informed the police of her disappearance. The Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington, meanwhile, has received a directive from the Kuwaiti Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad to contact and cooperate with the US authorities in finding the girl. The embassy has requested the Houston police to make diligent efforts in finding her.
There are rumors that she might have been a victim of hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims following the Sept. 11 attacks.
In another development, it was learned that the Sudanese national Jamal Ahmad Fadel, who was presented as a key witness in the recently-concluded trial of the twin bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania, revealed during the trial that "they (Al-Qaeda) asked me to shave my beard, wear Western dress, use perfumes, smoke cigarettes and pretend to have a penchant for women," he said, adding that the Al-Qaeda organization had given him this advice in order to obscure his identity and links from security officers.
He also disclosed that Al-Qaeda was planning to produce atomic weapons.
"I was sent to Sudan in 1993 to look for a specific man who dealt in sale of uranium," he said, adding that he did not know whether a deal was struck between the two parties as he had left Sudan after the initial meeting.
