The man, identified as Defendant No. 3 and who is being tried alongside 10 other men at a Riyadh court, said Mustafa Abul Qadir Al-Ansari was not an obedient son.
The defendant said his brother once called from the town of Al-Muasem in Jazan and asked him to collect his ID card and clean clothes from his mother in Makkah. Instead, he told the court, he collected Al-Ansari and brought him back to see his mother who was constantly in tears.
“When I took him in my car from Jazan to Makkah, I had no idea that I was carrying a time bomb that would later explode in the family. The father died, the children became orphans, many members of the family were put in jail and their wives asked for a divorce,” he said.
Al-Ansari was one of the four men who carried out the heinous attacks before being killed by security forces. The others included his brother Ayman Abdul Qadir Al-Ansari, their nephew Samir Sulaiman Al-Ansari and his brother Sami Sulaiman Al-Ansari.
The 11 men currently on trial in the capital are all members of the same family and were also related to the attackers.
The four terrorists who attacked a company called Yanpet killed two Americans, two Britons and an Australian.
Defendant No. 3 said that he had no idea that harboring his brother, who was wanted by security forces, was a crime punishable by law. “I visited him in Yemen before 9/11 and asked him to come back with me to the Kingdom and rectify his situation but he refused,” he said.
All 11 defendants deny knowledge of Al-Ansari’s intentions. They said they hid him because they were confident he would correct his ways and hand himself over to the authorities.
“I asked Mustafa to surrender through one of the sheikhs but he refused. I could not turn him in because I was certain that he would go out for jihad (holy war),” one defendant said.
There is no solid evidence to confirm or refute the 11 defendants’ testimonies. The case is now being examined by judges who consider all of them innocent unless proven otherwise.
The judges are inclined now more than ever to convict them, but the accused have the right to appeal the verdicts and to go later to the high court.
What makes the crime unique is that all those involved were related to each other, whether they were brothers, nephews or in-laws.
Mustafa, according to documents from the Interior Ministry, went to Afghanistan for jihad in 1413H. He stayed there for a year before coming back to the Kingdom where he remained for a short time before proceeding to London.
It was there he met two Saudis who opposed the country, Saad Al-Fakeeh and Muhammad Al-Masaari. He escaped from Britain leaving his passport there and went to Somalia where he stayed for a month. He then went to Yemen where he got married and stayed for four years. At the end of 2003 he came back to the Kingdom and six months later carried out the attack.