A US Senate panel is probing allegations that the FBI's office in Riyadh neglected thousands of leads related to the September 11, 2001 attacks.Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent reinforcements shortly after the attacks, "it appears that the bureau's team never got on top of the thousands of leads flowing in from the US and Saudi governments," Time magazine reported Sunday.
The Senate
Judiciary Committee wrote to FBI Director Robert Mueller on June 6 to request information about allegations that the FBI's Riyadh office was "delinquent in pursuing thousands of leads" related to September 11, the magazine said.
An FBI supervisor sent to Riyadh nearly a year after the attacks found the Riyadh office in disarray with a backlog of documents piled up in mountain of papers, it said.Since the embassy must be able to destroy sensitive document within 15 minutes during a hostile takeover, the supervisor ordered the destruction of hundreds or even thousands of pages, including many related to the September 11 probe, an FBI briefer told Congress, according to Time.
The FBI told Time the shredded material was "duplicative" or "only informational." But the Judiciary Committee's letter cites reports that some of the documents "had not been translated or reviewed," the magazine said.
In 2001, the FBI's Saudi Arabia office included a secretary and two agents: Wilfred Rattigan and his lieutenant, Egyptian-American Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, Time said. Both are no long in Saudi Arabia but remain FBI agents.
Rattigan, an African American who converted to Islam, is suing the FBI for alleged discrimination. He also claims that the FBI thwarted him by refusing to give him adequate resources to deal with the workload after September 11, Time said.
