Man on Bin Laden Tape Now Said to Be Guerrilla By Howard Schneider Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, December 18, 2001; Page A12
CAIRO, Dec. 17 -- The Saudi man shown talking with Osama bin Laden about the attacks against the United States on a videotape released by the Bush administration last week is not a religious scholar, as originally thought, but a former anti-Soviet guerrilla in Afghanistan and a longtime acquaintance of bin Laden's, according to Saudi officials.
U.S. and Saudi officials initially identified the man, who is shown chatting amicably with bin Laden and comparing notes on the results of the Sept. 11 hijackings, as Suleiman al Ghamdi, the head of a small mosque who was once imprisoned by Saudi authorities for his radical views.
However, ranking Saudi authorities now say the man is actually Khaled al-Harbi, who met bin Laden during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and later fought on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. Encouraged by their government, an estimated 15,000 Saudis joined the Afghan war against the Soviets.
Many Saudis' continued support for bin Laden, and the apparent involvement of Saudi nationals in the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, are sensitive subjects in Saudi Arabia, whose ruling family has for decades balanced support for Islamic governance with gradual modernization and close ties with the United States.
In an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine published this weekend, for example, the Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef, maintained that the United States still has not produced conclusive evidence that Saudis participated in the hijackings. The U.S. government says 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
"So far, we've received no evidence or documents from the American authorities that justify the suspicion or accusations raised against Saudi Arabian citizens," said Nayef, one of the top four or five members of the ruling family.
Saudi officials say Harbi's presence on the bin Laden videotape, though an embarrassment, raises no substantial concerns about local ties to the accused terrorist, a native of Saudi Arabia who was stripped of his citizenship in 1994 because of his efforts to organize opposition to the monarchy.
Harbi, who lost both his legs in combat, left Saudi Arabia 10 days after the Sept. 11 attacks to travel to Afghanistan in what a Saudi official called a sign of his support for the jihad, or holy war. Harbi likely hoped to support bin Laden "psychologically," or perhaps anticipated the war with the United States and wanted to die taking part in it, the Saudi official said.
"He was just enthusiastic to go to the front," the official said.
He has not returned to Saudi Arabia, and officials there apparently assume he is still in Afghanistan.
That the man is one of the thousands of Saudis who are Afghan war veterans may ease concern that the radical wing of the Saudi religious establishment has maintained active contact with bin Laden -- a worry raised when Harbi describes on the tape the positive response the hijackings received in some mosques and among some Saudis.
However, it also reinforces what Saudi officials have only quietly acknowledged: Just as the alleged participation of Saudi nationals in the hijackings reflects local support for bin Laden, so too does the continued presence of Saudi fighters at bin Laden's side.
One source in the Saudi intelligence community estimated that between 200 and at least 1,000 Saudis have been involved in the current fighting in Afghanistan.
"The government is concerned about this, but they were looking before September 11," a Saudi official said.