A news report about a Saudi family that disappeared from their home in Sarasota, Fla., just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks has brought an angry response from the co-chair of a congressional Sept. 11 committee. A former senator from Florida, Bob Graham, who also co-chaired the panel at the time he was senator, says he contacted President Barack Obama’s terrorism adviser after hearing about the news report, that reported the family had had contact with three of the 9/11 pilot hijackers.
“I … urged him to pursue an investigation of these matters, both in Sarasota and elsewhere … and then hopefully release that information to the American people,” Graham said Monday on The Dylan Ratigan Show, suggesting that other Saudi families in the U.S. might have also had contact with the terrorists, most of whom were Saudi.
The FBI office in Tampa issued a statement Monday saying the Sarasota case was one of many leads that “were resolved and determined not to be related to any threat nor connected to the 9/11 plot.” Graham said he had no reason to doubt the news report, which said the couple and their two children abruptly abandoned their luxury home, leaving behind a full refrigerator, clothes, furnishings and a new car in the driveway. However, if true, it reveals another Saudi terrorism connection that the FBI never disclosed to the public or to the 2002 joint Congressional intelligence committee investigating the attacks, said Graham.
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