UPDATE – 5:30 PM Eastern – The FBI has released a video and images of two suspects who are NOT the people in the widely distributed photos we posted below. Those images have been removed since they are no longer considered valid. The video can be viewed here.
UPDATE – 4 PM Eastern – One of the person’s of interest in the photos circulated by the government has come forward and declared he did not do it.
Teen: I Am Not the Boston Marathon Bomber
From ABC News:
The teenage boy authorities once investigated as possibly being connected to the Boston Marathon bombing told ABC News today he was shocked to see his face pop up on television and all over social media.
Salah Barhoun, 17, said he went to the police yesterday to clear his name after he found himself tagged in pictures online in connection to the Boston Marathon bombing. (Aaron “Tango” Tang)
Salah Barhoun, 17, said he went to the police yesterday to clear his name after he found himself tagged in pictures online. He had just gone to watch the race, he said, but soon after the explosions, he was singled out by internet sleuths as looking suspicious. Federal authorities passed around images of Barhoun, attempting to learn more information about him, sources told ABC News.
Editor’s Note – It is no secret that the Saudis, at least the royal family and well-connected other Saudis get preferential treatment by the federal government of the United States, but after Monday’s horror in Boston, why is it that another Saudi gets “very unusual” treatment after initially being reported as a’person of interest’.
This harkens back to the days soon after 9/11 when Saudis were allowed to leave the country when no one else was allowed to fly. In fact, they were transported by government officials who denied the fact for years. Here is an excerpt from the Tampa Bay Times from late September 2001:
TAMPA – Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation’s air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left. The men, one of them thought to be a member of the Saudi royal family, were accompanied by a former FBI agent and a former Tampa police officer on the flight to Lexington, Ky. The Saudis then took another flight out of the country. The two ex-officers returned to TIA a few hours later on the same plane.
For nearly three years, White House, aviation and law enforcement officials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied published reports and widespread Internet speculation about its purpose. But now, at the request of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, TIA officials have confirmed that the flight did take place and have supplied details.
As recently as two days ago, another revelation was published in the Tampa Bay Times; acquired through BrowardBulldog.org’s efforts in gaining documents through the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ (FOIA); that another family suspected of complicity prior to the 9/11/01 attack left the country in haste, only to end up in Saudi Arabia. The documentation was still redacted or ‘blacked out’ in many areas, but it is now confirmed that the al Hijji family left in haste two weeks prior to that other horrific day:
A Saudi family who left their Sarasota-area home weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks had “many connections” to “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001,” according to newly released FBI records.
One partially declassified document, marked “secret,” lists three of those individuals and ties them to the Venice flight school where suicide hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained. Accomplice Ziad Jarrah took flying lessons at another school a block away.
The information in the documents runs counter to previous FBI statements. National security and other reasons are cited for numerous additional deletions scattered across the 31 released pages. Four more pages were withheld.
The records cast new light on one of the remaining unresolved mysteries regarding Florida’s many connections to the Sept. 11 attacks: Before the attacks, what went on at 4224 Escondito Circle in Prestancia, the home of Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his family?
The article continues:
The FBI released the records as a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by BrowardBulldog.org inches toward trial this summer in federal court in Fort Lauderdale. The suit was filed in September after the FBI rejected both a request for its investigative records and an appeal of that request.
Al-Hijji could not be reached last week. Last year, he told a reporter his family did not depart their Sarasota home in haste but left so he could take a job with Aramco in Saudi Arabia. He denied involvement in the Sept. 11 plot, which he called “a crime against the USA and all humankind.” (Read the rest here.)
Remember, just recently, Janet Napolitano through her capacity as DHS Director, designated Saudis for preferential treatment while traveling to the USA:
The Department of Homeland Security has decided to designate some Saudi Arabian travelers as low risk passengers which means after the DHS has determined that they feel certain Saudi Arabians are low risk they will not have to go through the rigorous airport security checks that most of us are forced to go through.
That is all very well and good, after all if a person is a frequent flyer and the government has done an assessment and finds no threat why should they have to go through the airport security checks every single time they fly? That is until you remember how thorough the federal government actually is–after all they did ignore all the warning signs in the case of the Fort Hood terrorist, Nidal Hasan, and allowed him to serve in the United States military alongside the very people he despised. But we are supposed to trust them on this because we are supposed to believe they are competent. (Read more at America’s Watchtower here.)
Where does this all end? Or, should we ask, why does it continue when they are:
“Statistically, Saudia (sic) Arabians are far away the single most likely demographic to hijack a plane. Therefore the Obama administration is going to give them special treatment at the airport.”
Apparently its not just Obama, George W. Bush was in charge when the Saudis were allowed to leave in 2001.
So now, just after the first self-attested “terror” event Obama and John Kerry have closed door emergency meetings with Saudi officials?
Obama Has Emergency Meeting With Muslim Prince After Boston Bombing
By NTEB.com
The Saudi “person of interest” suspected of being involved in the Boston Marathon bombings is being deported from the United States next week on “national security grounds,” according to a terrorism expert, who notes that the move is “very unusual,” especially given an unscheduled meeting yesterday between President Obama and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal.
The attempt to cover up a possible Saudi connection to the Boston attack could explain why authorities are scrambling to get their official narrative straight after photos emerged yesterday on the Internet showing numerous suspects carrying large backpacks, some of them middle eastern in appearance and two of the individuals having been almost certainly identified as employees of private military/security firm Craft International.
The FBI had set a press conference for 5pm EST yesterday afternoon but the event was cancelled hours after the photos were seen by millions of people online. The federal agency blamed the media for erroneous reporting, stating, “these stories often have unintended consequences.”
CNN also had to backtrack after they announced that a suspect had been arrested, a report that was subsequently denied by authorities. Reports of a “dark skinned man” being arrested were later mothballed.
According to terrorism expert Steve Emerson, 20-year-old Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi national first suspected of being involved in Monday’s twin bomb attack, is being hastily deported.
Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi – set to be deported back to Saudi Arabia for “national security reasons”
Alharbi was put under armed guard in hospital after the bombing, was visited by Saudi diplomat Azzam bin Abdel Karim, and later had his apartment raided by federal and state law enforcement agents.
“I just learned from my own sources that he is now going to be deported on national security grounds next Tuesday, which is very unusual,” Emerson told Fox News last night.
The news follows an unscheduled meeting between President Obama and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal at the White House yesterday afternoon. “The meeting was not on Obama’s public schedule,” reports Reuters.
“That’s very interesting because this is the way things are done with Saudi Arabia. You don’t arrest their citizens. You deport them, because they don’t want them to be embarrassed and that’s the way we appease them,” Emerson told host Sean Hannity.
A scheduled 10 a.m. photo op between John Kerry and the Saudi Foreign Minister was also abruptly cancelled on Tuesday morning because Kerry was tired from his busy schedule, an explanation that journalists refused to swallow, with the Associated Press’ Matt Lee telling spokesman Patrick Ventrell, “I find it hard to believe that you expect us to believe that that’s the real reason for this.”
As World Net Daily’s Joe Kovacs documents, “Saudi student Alharbi shares the same last name as a major Saudi clan that includes scores of al-Qaida operatives.”
The Alharbi clan has long been active in al-Qaida. Khaled bin Ouda bin Mohammed al-Harbi, for example, is a Saudi national who joined Osama bin Laden’s mujahadeen group in the 1980s. He reportedly became an al-Qaida member in the mid-1990s. He turned himself in to Saudi authorities in 2004 as part of an amnesty deal.
The BBC reported Khaled Alharbi was married to the daughter of al-Qaida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahri. He reportedly appeared with bin Laden in a video praising the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Another top al-Qaida operative is Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi, a Saudi national identified by the State Department as “a key member of an al-Qaida network operating in Iran.”
Given the fact that the Obama administration has sent more than half a billion dollars and the CIA is shipping weapons to FSA rebels in Syria who pledged allegiance to and are led by Al-Qaeda militants, the notion that one of these militants would carry out an attack on U.S. soil would be extremely damaging to the White House.
Radio host Michael Savage floated the theory yesterday that the Boston police were told to cancel the press conference by the Obama administration and the FBI, because the Saudi Foreign Minister demanded that the suspect be allowed to leave the country.
