The United States has formally concluded that Iran shared responsibility in the Al Qaida suicide air strikes in which more than 3,000 people were killed in 2001.
A U.S. federal district court has determined that Iran provided “material support” to the Al Qaida plotters of what is known as the 9/11 attacks. Judge George Daniels, citing witnesses and expert testimony, said the Iranian support makes Teheran legally responsible for the Al Qaida attacks on New York and Washington.
“The extensive record submitted to this court, including fact witnesses and expert testimony, is satisfactory to this court,” Daniels said.
In a hearing at the New York City courthouse on Dec. 15, Daniels said he would rule that Iran was responsible for 9/11. The judge heard testimony from three men who had worked for Iranian intelligence agencies.
“This contingency plan for unconventional or asymmetrical warfare against the United States was the origin of subsequent terror attacks against the United States, up to and including the terrorist attacks of 9/11.” attorney and investigator Timothy Fleming said.
Fleming said he presented evidence by three Iranian defectors, one of whom attended a meeting with Al Qaida’s No. 2 Ayman Zawahiri in January 2001, eight months before the attacks on the United States. One of the defectors was identified as Abdolghassem Mesbahi, deemed a confidant of Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Mesbahi, now targeted by the Teheran regime, was said to have participated in planning major attacks on the United States.
Mesbahi was said by the plaintiffs to have sought to warn the West of the 9/11 plot. Fleming said Mesbahi recalled first receiving a coded message on July 23, 2001 that the Iranian plot, dubbed “Satan in the Flames,” against the United States was being implemented.
“Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida joined the Iranian operational planning in the early to mid-1990s,” Fleming said.