The Khobar Towers Bombing was a guerrilla attack on a US military barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia in 1996 that killed 19 US soldiers and 1 Saudi soldier, and wounded 372 people of various nationalities. I refuse to call this a terrorist attack, because I can’t see how attacking military personnel anywhere is “terrorist.”
Very quickly, the Saudi regime rounded up eight members of Hezbollah Al-Hijaz, a Shia militant group in Saudi Arabia with ties to Iran, and accused them of committing the crime. Shortly afterwards, the Saudis released the confessions of the men involved, including testimony that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard had been involved. The group was also accused of the bombing of a Saudi National Guard office the year before.
The Saudis refused to give US troops access to the suspects, and their behavior was suspicious in other ways. Right after the bombing, the Saudis were on the scene destroying evidence. They only stopped due to serious threats from the US ambassador.
The Saudis knew right away that Al Qaeda was behind the bombing. They also quickly figured out that Al Qaeda had been behind the bombing of the Saudi National Guard. But since the regime was so deeply tied in with bin Laden, in both cases, the Saudis conspired to blame an easy target, the horribly repressed Saudi Shia and the hated Shia regime of Iran, for the acts.
Years later, in 2002, a series of car bombs killed several Westerners in the Kingdom. The Saudis quickly arrested five Westerners and accused them of the bombing. Shortly, videotaped confessions were once again released. Some were released later, and one man, a Canadian now back in Canada, subsequently said that the confession had been beaten and tortured out of him. They had beaten him until his balls swelled up the size of oranges.
It turns out that the Saudis had beaten and tortured confessions out of the eight Shia too.
The FBI director at the time was Louis Freeh. Freeh allowed himself to be convinced by Saudi Prince Bandar that the Shia were guilty of the crime. Some FBI agents and the CIA soon began to suspect that Al Qaeda had done the bombings, but Freeh was locking out all discussion of that angle. In part this was due to his close relationship with the Saudis.
Shortly before Freeh retired, an indictment was issued in US court for various Hezbollah Al-Hijaz members who were accused in the bombing.
The problem with it is the same as the problem with the original Saudi arrests and taped confessions. All eight of the Shia are innocent and the accusations against them never made sense anyway. It’s true that they were all members of Hezbollah Al-Hijaz and that this was a militant group. However, it appears that this group never carried out any militant attacks, and may not have even planned any. There was no Iranian involvement in the Khobar attack either. It was all a Saudi lie.
Who did it? Same people who carried out the Saudi National Guard bombing and the car bombs of 2002 – Al Qaeda. Interestingly, bin Laden even confessed to these attacks in videotaped statements. These were dismissed, with officials stating that bin Laden often took credit for attacks he had not done. I don’t believe that that is true.
If you go to the Wikipedia pages on the attack and on Hezbollah al-Hijaz, the group is explicitly blamed for the attack and the outrageous indictment is mentioned. Apparently this is the standard line in US society today. Too bad it’s a great big fat lie.
The men listed in the indictment, Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Mughassil, Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed Al-Nasser, Ali Saed Bin Ali El-Hoorie and Ibrahim Salih Mohammed Al-Yacoub, among others, are all innocent, and the story of how the plot unfolded, listed in the indictment, is a big lie.
In 2003, Al Qaeda attacked several expatriate compounds in Saudi Arabia, killing a number of expats and causing lots of damage. Now the evidence was too great to deny anymore, and the Saudi regime finally admitted that Al Qaeda was active in the Kingdom. Too bad a bunch of innocent people had to be beaten and tortured into confessions before that happened.
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The pejorative “Al Qaeda” is linked to any attack against western interests.
I doubt Bin Ladin had anything to do with the Khobar Towars attack with no credible evidence shown either via communication intercepts or financial records with Bin Ladin only being indicted with the 98 Embassy bombings and like the 2003 attacks is probably just offshoots of groups that the Saudis with US and western backing were supporting to fight in foreign wars like Bosnia, Algeria and Chechnya.
The organiser of the 2003 attacks was a veteran of all 3 wars.