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Bin Laden happy with September 11 toll
Osama Bin Laden's driver overheard the Al Qaida leader saying he was happy about the death toll in the September 11 attacks and thought the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down, according to one of the driver's interrogators.
- Agencies
- Published: 09:46 July 24, 2008
- "If they didn't shoot that fourth plane it would have hit the dome," Bin Laden told Zawahiri, according to Hamdan's account.
- Image Credit: Gulf News Archive
Guantanamo Bay: Osama Bin Laden's driver overheard the Al Qaida leader saying he was happy about the death toll in the September 11 attacks and thought the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was shot down, according to one of the driver's interrogators.
The evidence by Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, was meant to prove that the driver, Salim Hamdan, was close to Al Qaida's leadership.
Hamdan, a Yemeni father of two with a fourth-grade education, is the first Guantanamo prisoner to face trial before the controversial tribunal at the remote base on Cuba. He faces life in prison if convicted.
"Bin Laden was happy about the results and Hamdan heard Bin Laden say he didn't expect the operation to be that successful," said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent.
Soufan also said Hamdan told him about a conversation he overheard when he was driving Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
The two men were looking at a magazine which described the flight routes of the September 11 hijacked planes, Soufan said.
"If they didn't shoot that fourth plane it would have hit the dome," Soufan said Bin Laden told Zawahiri, according to Hamdan's account.
"I assumed ‘the dome' meant either Congress or the White House," Soufan said. "Hamdan said he did not know what they mean by the dome."
United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field. US officials have never said it was shot down but there was speculation about the issue at the time.
Describing the relationship between the driver and the Al Qaida leader, Soufan said Bin Laden had given Hamdan some marriage advice, suggesting he go back to Yemen and find a women from a "pious religious family," and when Hamdan returned with a wife, Bin Laden held a feast in celebration.
Prosecutors have portrayed Hamdan as a driver and bodyguard for the fugitive Al Qaida leader who had access to the Islamic militant group's inner circle.
Defence lawyers say he was just a hired hand in the motor pool who never joined Al Qaida.
Hamdan was able to identify some of the top Al Qaida leaders in photographs and a suicide bomber who struck the guided missile destroyer USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
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