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(回答先: リビアがサウジ皇太子暗殺計画 米紙報道（共同通信・速報） 投稿者 ラクダ 日時 2004 年 6 月 10 日 13:47:40)
Two Are Said to Tell of Libyan Plot to Kill Saudi Ruler
By PATRICK E. TYLER
Published: June 10, 2004
part1
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/international/africa/10LIBY.html
ASHINGTON, June 9 — While the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was renouncing terrorism and negotiating the lifting of sanctions last year, his intelligence chiefs ordered a covert operation to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia and destabilize the oil-rich kingdom, according to statements by two participants in the conspiracy.
Those participants, Abdurahman Alamoudi, an American Muslim leader now in jail in Alexandria, Va., and Col. Mohamed Ismael, a Libyan intelligence officer in Saudi custody, have given separate statements to American and Saudi officials outlining the plot.
Mr. Alamoudi, has told Federal Bureau of Investigation officials and federal prosecutors that Colonel Qaddafi approved the assassination plan. Mr. Qaddafi's son, in an interview in London, called the accusation "nonsense."
American officials confirm that Mr. Alamoudi and Mr. Ismael have offered detailed accounts of a Libyan plot to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah and that they appear to be credible enough to have launched an American investigation. But the officials said they are still examining the scope of the plot, how far it advanced and whether Colonel Qaddafi was involved. They said the accusations were one reason the United States had not removed Libya from the State Department's list of nations that support terrorism.
On Wednesday, a senior administration official said: "We are fully aware of Libya's significant past involvement with terrorism. Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi has pledged to end Libya's ties with terrorism and cooperate with the United States and our allies in the war on terrorism. We continue to monitor closely Libya's adherence to this pledge."
As a revolutionary who overthrew a monarchy, Colonel Qaddafi has long regarded the Saudi royal family with a degree of contempt. The feeling was often mutual as he charted an erratic course in the Middle East. In recent years, however, Saudi and British diplomats worked behind the scenes to help Libya negotiate an end to sanctions resulting from the Libyan terrorist operation that downed Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.
Mr. Alamoudi's statements were offered in plea negotiations with federal prosecutors that are not complete. He was indicted last October in the United States District Court in Alexandria accused of violating United States sanctions by traveling to Libya and receiving money from Libyan officials.
Under federal guidelines, prosecutors could urge a judge to reduce his prison term in exchange for his statements, criminal lawyers said.
The statements of the two conspirators were described by three people with extensive official knowledge of the case who insisted that they not be identified because information about it remains classified in intelligence and law enforcement channels. Senior officials in the American, British and Saudi governments have been aware of the investigation of the assassination plot for several months.
Colonel Qaddafi and Crown Prince Abdullah clashed at the Arab summit meeting that immediately preceded the war in Iraq. The two leaders exchanged insults in open session, accusing each other of selling out to colonial powers. An indignant Prince Abdullah glared at Colonel Qaddafi and said, "Your lies precede you and your grave is in front of you."
A Libyan terrorist plot, if verified by American, British and Saudi governments who are working in close coordination to investigate it, would undermine Colonel Qaddafi's public pledges that his government has abandoned terrorism. It could also trigger a reinstatement of international sanctions on Libya that were lifted by the United Nations Security Council last September after Colonel Qaddafi's government renounced terrorism, admitted responsibility for the 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing and agreed to pay $10 million compensation to the families.
A senior Bush administration official said that the emergence of convincing evidence that Colonel Qaddafi ordered or condoned an assassination and terror campaign could cause a "180 degree" change of American policy toward Libya.
President Bush has conveyed to the Saudi royal family that he is going to find out what happened in the alleged conspiracy, according to a diplomat.
(Page 2 of 3)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/international/africa/10LIBY.html?pagewanted=2
Mr. Alamoudi has told prosecutors that he twice met with Colonel Qaddafi, in June and August of 2003, to discuss details of the assassination plan, according to people with official access to his statements. In June, Mr. Alamoudi said, Colonel Qaddafi told him, "I want the Crown Prince killed either through assassination or through a coup." By August, according to Mr. Alamoudi's account, Colonel Qaddafi asked why he had not yet seen "heads flying" in the Saudi royal family.
Mr. Alamoudi's account is critical for federal prosecutors because it ties the terrorist plot that has been said to exist to a head of state. For that reason, Mr. Alamoudi has been questioned in great detail about his two meetings with Colonel Qaddafi, including descriptions of the Libyan leader's farm in Sidra, where they reportedly met in June, and of Colonel Qaddafi's office in Tripoli, where they reportedly met in August.
F.B.I. investigators from the Washington field office are trying to arrange meetings with two of Mr. Alamoudi's associates to whom he confided details of the plot as further corroboration.
The first person to provide Saudi, the British and American authorities with an account of a plot was Colonel Ismael, 36, who was captured by Egyptian police after he fled Saudi Arabia last November in an aborted "drop" of $1 million to a team of four Saudi militants who were prepared to attack Prince Abdullah's motorcade with shoulder-fired missiles or grenade launchers, according to his statements.
Colonel Ismael has said that his orders to be operational commander of the plot came from Libyan intelligence chiefs, Abdullah Senoussi and Musa Kussa, both of whom report directly to Colonel Qaddafi, according to the people who described the statements.
F.B.I. and Central Intelligence Agency officers have twice traveled to Saudi Arabia to interview Colonel Ismael. Investigators are said to believe that the account matches that of Mr. Alamoudi and that, taken together, the accounts could form the basis of a criminal indictment against Colonel Qaddafi on charges of leading a conspiracy that included an American citizen, Mr. Alamoudi.
Mr. Kussa played a leading role last fall with American and British intelligence teams to work out a surrender of Libya's illicit weapons programs.
F.B.I. officials have yet to interview the four Saudis who were to carry out the assassination attempt, but Saudi officials said that they would agree to make them available upon receiving a request.
The Saudis were arrested Nov. 27 as they prepared to receive $1 million in cash from Colonel Ismael and a team of Libyan intelligence officers at the Hilton Hotel in Mecca. The hotel overlooks the holiest shrine in Islam. Though two people with access to the statements of Mr. Alamoudi and Colonel Ismael said that the plan to attack Prince Abdullah was to strike his motorcade with armor-piercing missiles or rocket-propelled grenades, a third person said there was a suspicion that the four Saudis arrested in Mecca were going to fire their weapons at Prince Abdullah's apartment, also overlooking the shrine.
In the reported conspiracy, Mr. Alamoudi and Colonel Ismael traveled to London seeking to make contacts among Saudi dissidents through whom they could recruit militants in the kingdom willing to participate in the plot. They distributed more than $2 million in cash in this recruitment drive in London, according to the account of their statements.
Colonel Qaddafi's son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, described the reported plot as "nonsense" in an interview in London, though he acknowledged that the Libyan intelligence officer, Colonel Ismael, was missing and presumed by Libya to be in Saudi custody.
"I don't know exactly what he is saying in custody, but I can guarantee that nobody asked him to create cells and assassinate people," the young Mr. Qaddafi said.
Mr. Qaddafi said he could not say whether Colonel Ismael was an intelligence officer. "I don't know in fact, but maybe yes and maybe no," he said.
Colonel Qaddafi also indicated that there may have been a "misunderstanding" over Libyan support for what he called "reform" in Saudi Arabia.
"If we support the people who want to reform Saudi Arabia, if doesn't mean we are working against the government," he said.
Mr. Alamoudi, an American citizen living in Falls Church, Va., has been a longtime spokesman for Muslim views in America as founder of the American Muslim Council.
(Page 3 of 3)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/international/africa/10LIBY.html?pagewanted=3
The State Department paid him as a consultant to travel overseas and advocate tolerance and reconciliation among Jews, Christians and Muslims, but was thereafter accused of making statements in support of terrorism.
A person close to Mr. Alamoudi said he believed that Mr. Alamoudi entered into the reported conspiracy because he badly needed money and did not believe that Colonel Qaddafi would carry out the plan to kill Prince Abdullah.
The accusations present a difficult problem for Saudi Arabia, which has suffered a series of major terrorist attacks in the last year, the most recent of which left 22 people dead during a shooting spree by militants in Khobar on the Persian Gulf coast.
Crown Prince Abdullah is said by two officials to be convinced that Colonel Qaddafi was out to kill him and decapitate the Saudi government. But the Saudi leader is also concerned about playing into the hands of American hardliners who might use the case to call for leadership change in Libya, a step that Saudi Arabia would oppose, officials said.
"We are going to really jam Qaddafi over this, but there is no pretext for regime change," the Saudi official said. "What is in our interest is to keep the caged animal in his cage."
Within weeks of the confrontation between Mr. Qaddafi and Crown Prince Abdullah at the Arab summit meeting last March, Mr. Senoussi, one of the Libyan intelligence chiefs, convened the first meeting to plan a campaign against the Saudis, the two participants said.
Present at the meeting was Mr. Alamoudi, who had been summoned from the United States by Mr. Senoussi. Mr. Alamoudi was paired with Colonel Ismael to start making money "drops" in London as part of what was generally described as a "destabilization" campaign, according to persons with access to Mr. Alamoudi's statement.
Mr. Senoussi's instruction remained vague during the initial phase, but when Mr. Alamoudi arrived at Colonel Qaddafi's farm at Sidra in June, the dimensions of the plot escalated greatly, according the people familiar with the statements.
Colonel Qaddafi asked Mr. Senoussi and a Libyan ambassador to leave the room so he could talk privately with Mr. Alamoudi.
"Why do you cooperate with us against the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia?" Colonel Qaddafi said, according to persons with access to Mr. Alamoudi's statement.
"Because I disapprove of what the Crown Prince said to you," Mr. Alamoudi was reported to reply.
After a number of large cash transfers, Mr. Alamoudi traveled to Tripoli in August and stated that, while there, he met again with Colonel Qaddafi.
"How come I haven't seen anything? How come I have not seen heads flying?" Colonel Qaddafi reportedly demanded?
Mr. Alamoudi briefed him on how plans were progressing.
In early August, Mr. Alamoudi was arrested at Heathrow Airport carrying $340,000 in cash that he later said he had received from a Libyan intelligence officer. British officials confiscated the cash and interrogated Mr. Alamoudi, who said he had accepted the money from the World Islamic Call Society, a Libyan-backed charity.
Mr. Alamoudi boarded a flight from London to Washington Dulles airport in late September, he was arrested upon landing.
He was later indicted accused of violating United States sanctions by traveling to Libya and by receiving funds from Libyan officials.
Colonel Ismael has freely spoken about the plot, according to persons familiar with his statement. During one F.B.I. interrogation, he was asked whether he had been tortured or abused in detention. He replied that he had been treated well and that he wanted to apply for political asylum, because he assumed that if he returns to Libya, he will be killed, the people said.
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