U.S. Presses for Access to Bombing Suspect

After months of frustration with Saudi Arabia over its handling of a bombing in June that killed 19 U.S. servicemen stationed there, American investigators believe that the arrest in Canada of an Iranian-educated Saudi may be a major break in the case.

The suspect is believed to belong to the terrorist group thought responsible for the attack.

The FBI is now pressing for access to Hani Abdel Rahim Hussein Sayegh, who was picked up last Tuesday as he was shopping with a friend in downtown Ottawa.

“This is a very important development,” a senior Clinton administration official said. “It has the potential to be our first big break.”

But in a telephone interview Monday evening from an Ottawa detention center, Sayegh vehemently denied any involvement in either of two explosions in the last 17 months in Saudi Arabia that killed 24 Americans.

He said through an interpreter that any alleged role on his part, including reports that he drove one of the trucks involved in the June explosion at a military housing complex in eastern Saudi Arabia, was impossible because he had been in Syria for two years.

The administration official, however, said Sayegh has been a focus of the investigation for “some time.” He has been in Canada--where he has applied for political asylum--since August.

Sayegh was taken into custody as a possible security threat to Canada.

If FBI investigators gain access to him in Canada--or perhaps later in the United States--it will be the first time they talk to any suspect believed directly linked to either of the two Saudi bombings.

Four suspects in the November 1995 attack on a Saudi national guard training facility in Riyadh, in which five U.S. military personnel died, were beheaded before the FBI had a chance to talk with them. And so far, Saudi officials reportedly have given U.S. agents only transcripts of interrogations of more than three dozen suspects in the 1996 attack in Dhahran.

Saudi officials have said they believe the perpetrators of the June bombing were Shiite Muslims from eastern Saudi Arabia linked to an underground cell of Saudi Hezbollah--or Party of God--which also has members in Syria, Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley and Iran.

Sayegh, 28, fits part of that profile. In the interview, he said that he is from a Shiite family in Qatif on Saudi Arabia’s eastern coast. He readily admitted that he is a political dissident but denied affiliation with any formal group.

He refused to spell out why he opposes the existing Saudi regime, for fear of retaliation against his wife, 3-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son, who he said are still in his homeland. In Syria, he said, he had been involved in tracking human rights violations in Saudi Arabia.

Sayegh also talked openly about his presence from 1987 through 1991 in Iran, which Saudi officials repeatedly have suggested had a direct role in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military residential complex in Dhahran. He claimed, however, that he was engaged only in religious studies at seminaries in Qom, the theological center of the Islamic republic, after which he returned to Saudi Arabia for three years.

He said he did not get military training in Iran or anywhere else.

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He moved to Canada, he said, to get beyond the reach of the Saudi government. He had intended to bring his family with him, but his wife and children were stopped and their passports confiscated when they tried to leave Saudi Arabia to meet him in Kuwait, he said.

Canadian officials would not confirm that the United States is seeking Sayegh’s extradition. But in the interview, Sayegh said he had been told that he could be handed over to U.S. authorities.

In asserting his innocence, Sayegh posed two questions: “If I were in fact the one who planted the bomb, why would I have come to Canada via Boston?” and thus risk arrest by U.S. officials.

“And if I participated in the explosion, why would my wife [who had been in Syria with him] have visited Saudi right after the explosion, since the dangers would be obvious?”

He admitted that he had been detained in Saudi Arabia in the past, but he refused to say why.

For the moment, Sayegh’s case is being handled as an immigration rather than a criminal matter, a Canadian official said.