FBI investigated another Sarasota link to 9/11

http://www.heraldtribune.com/article...a-link-to-9-11

By Zac Anderson & Robert Eckhart
Published: Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:10 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:10 p.m.

Newly revealed details from an FBI investigation into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks link a Saudi family living in an upscale Sarasota neighborhood to the hijackers, who made multiple visits to the Sarasota home before 9/11.

The Saudi family appear to have fled their home in the gated Palmer Ranch community of Prestancia two weeks before Sept. 11, raising suspicions about whether they had knowledge of the impending attacks. The family left clothes hanging in closets, food in the refrigerator, toys floating in the pool and three cars in the driveway and garage.

Details of the investigation were uncovered by author Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen, editor of Browardbulldog.org. Their story, which relied largely on an unnamed counterterrorism agent as well as former Prestancia security guard Larry Berberich, was published Thursday on Christensen's website and in the Miami Herald.

The story documents yet another potential connection between Southwest Florida and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Three of the four men who piloted planes on Sept. 11 attended flight schools in Venice and lived there until shortly before the attacks. Two of them, Sept. 11 mastermind Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, were found to have visited the Saudi family in Prestancia based on photos of their license plates taken at the security gate and information the men gave gate guards.

Neighbors did not grow suspicious of the Saudi family until after Sept. 11, when their abrupt departure days earlier raised questions.

At least three Sarasota residents, including a neighbor, a security guard and a real estate agent, called the FBI to report the Saudi family's odd behavior. Counterterrorism experts later pieced together the family's connection to the hijackers, but by then the Saudis had returned to their home country.

In a Thursday interview with the Herald Tribune, a former neighbor and close friend of the Saudi family who visited their house nearly every day for a few years in the mid-90s said she always wondered what had become of her old friends.

Sarasota High School graduate Carla DiBello, 27, said she became close with Anoud al-Hiijjii, the young Saudi mother.

Anoud, who was only 18 or 19 at the time, treated DiBello like a younger sister and DiBello enjoyed playing with the family's young twins, Esam and Hamsa.

DiBello and Anoud went to movies together, shopped at the mall and took trips to Busch Gardens.

DiBello said Anoud was a heavyset, pious woman who prayed multiple times a day. But in many ways she and her husband, Abdulazzi, were very Westernized. She sported a 10-carat, heart-shaped diamond ring. He liked Polo shirts and expensive jeans. They wore designer clothes, drove a Range Rover and a Lexus, loved American movies and decorated their home lavishly.

Abdulazzi often walked next door to visit with DiBello's father, Tom, and drink liquor, something Anoud did not approve of.

"Anoud would make him go pray and be more involved in their culture," Carla DiBello said.

Tom DiBello, an insurance salesman who now lives near Fort Lauderdale, said Abdulazzi was affable and outgoing.

DiBello got the impression that Abdulazzi, who at times said he was a business student but also talked about exporting furniture, was coasting on his wife's family money.

Anoud's father, Esam Ghazzawi, is a well-known interior designer and financier in Saudi Arabia who owned multiple properties in the United States, including the Prestancia home. The family bragged that Ghazzawi had a close relationship with the Saudi royal family.

Carlo DiBello said she met Ghazzawi at least four times and described him as "very eccentric." He enjoyed big family dinners and always had a large security detail.

Once, DiBello was shopping with the family around the time that Ab Roller exercise gadgets became popular.

Ghazzawi "ordered 40 or 50 of them at once and said he wanted them at all of his homes and offices around the world," DiBello said.

Abdulazzi's easy manner did not raise suspicions, but Tom DiBello said in hindsight some of their conversations were odd.

"He felt Americans came to their country to steal their oil and take their money," DiBello said. "He said he did not like Americans because of what we did to his country. He said, 'How would you like it if we came to your country and did that?' "

The al-Hiijjii family did not socialize widely and did not belong to Prestancia's posh country club or take advantage of the world-class golf course, DiBello said.

Carla DiBello, who now works in Los Angeles as a television producer for the show "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," said she lost touch with the family around 1999 after she entered high school and moved out of Prestancia.

House for sale
Sarasota real estate agent Louise Tessier may have been one of the last local residents to have contact with the al-Hiijjii family before they disappeared.

Tessier sat down with the couple in their family room in May 2001 after they contacted her about selling the Prestancia home.

Anoud told Tessier they wanted to sell the house because a brother was headed to college in Tampa.

Tessier didn't ask too many follow-up questions.

"We were never on a comfortable footing," she said. "You couldn't talk to them as easy as you could with other people."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Tessier got a tip that the family had abandoned their Prestancia home. She tried to contact them by phone and email. She remembers calling a phone number in Saudi Arabia but never getting through to the right people.

When Tessier went to check out the house, she saw that the pool was green and a car was parked in the driveway.

"There was stuff in the house that shouldn't have been left in the house," she said. "And I can't remember if I found food in the refrigerator or what but it was just like they had abandoned the whole thing."

She went back to her office and called the FBI.

"They knew who I meant," Tessier said. "Didn't have any problem getting that through to them. It made me feel like they knew what was going on."

A few months later, Tessier said the FBI called her back and told her that the al-Hiijjiis were "cleared." The FBI said that she could go through with the sale, and that the federal government would not be seizing the house.

But Tessier says she had had enough of the family.

"I just shut down on the whole thing. I didn't want to have anything to do with it."

What has become of the al-Hiijjii and Ghazzawi families since they fled the United States is unclear.

The Justice Department, the lead agency that investigated the attacks, refused to comment, saying it would discuss only information already released.

The al-Hiijjii and Ghazzawi families could not be reached for comment. The house was sold in 2003, records show.

Inquiry kept secret
The FBI investigation into the al-Hiijjii and Ghazzawi families was not reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who cochaired the bipartisan congressional joint inquiry into the attacks, said he should have been told about the findings, saying it "opens the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11. . . . No information relative to the named people in Sarasota was disclosed."

For Graham, who served as Florida's governor from 1979 to 1987, the connections between the hijackers and residents raise questions about whether other Saudi nationals in Florida might have known of the impending attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

The FBI investigation began the month after 9/11 when Larry Berberich, senior administrator and security officer of Prestancia, reported that the couple, living with their small children at the three-bedroom home at 4224 Escondito Circle, had left in a hurry in a white van, probably on Aug. 30.

They abandoned three recently registered vehicles, including a brand-new Chrysler PT Cruiser, in the garage and driveway.

As an adviser to the Sarasota County sheriff, Berberich was with the group that received President George W. Bush during his truncated visit to a Sarasota school on the morning of 9/11. He alerted sheriff's deputies.

Patrick Gallagher, one of the Saudis' neighbors, had become suspicious even earlier, and had fired off an email to the FBI on the day of the attacks. Gallagher said law enforcement officers arrived and began an investigation, with agents swarming "all over the place, in their blue jackets," he recalled.

Berberich and a senior counterterrorism agent said they were able to get into the abandoned house, ultimately finding "there was mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms ... all the toiletries still in place ... all their clothes hanging in the closet ... TVs ... opulent furniture, equal or greater in value than the house ... the pool running, with toys in it."

The counterterrorism officer, who requested that his name not be disclosed, said agents went on to make some troubling discoveries: Phone records and the Prestancia gate records linked the house on Escondito Circle to the hijackers.

The links were not only to Atta and his hijack pilots, the agent said, but to 11 other terrorist suspects, including Walid al-Shehhri, one of the men who flew with Atta on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center.

But it was the gate records at the Prestancia development that produced the most telltale information.

People who arrived by car had to give their names and the home's address they were visiting. Gate staff would sometimes ask to see a driver's license and note the name, said Berberich.

More importantly, he added, the license plates of cars pulling through the gate were photographed.

Atta is known to have used variations of his name, but the license plate of the car he owned was on record.

The vehicle and name information on Atta and Jarrah fit that of drivers entering Prestancia on their way to visit the home at Escondito Circle, said Berberich and the counterterrorism officer.

County property records identify the owners of the house at the time as Ghazzawi and his American-born wife, Deborah, both with a P.O. box in al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia, and another address in the capital, Riyadh.

The sudden departure two weeks before 9/11 was tracked in detail by the FBI after the attacks, the counterterrorism agent said. First they traveled to a Ghazzawi property in Arlington, Va., then — with Esam Ghazzawi — to Riyadh by way of Dulles and Heathrow airports.

The counterterrorism agent said that Ghazzawi and al-Hiijjii had been on a watch list at the FBI, and that a U.S. agency involved in tracking terrorist funds was interested in both men even before 9/11.

About a year after the family vacated the home, the FBI made an attempt to lure the owner back. Scott McKay, a Sarasota lawyer for the Prestancia homeowners' association in its claim for unpaid dues on the property, said the FBI tried to get him to bring the Saudis back for the transaction.

"They didn't say you must do this. It was more like, 'But we'd really, really like you to make this happen,'" said McKay said.

McKay said he tried to get the Ghazzawis to sign the necessary documents in person, but the ploy failed because the documents could legally be signed elsewhere using a notary. Records show Ghazzawi's signature was notarized by the vice consul of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon in September 2003. Deborah Ghazzawi's signature was notarized in Riverside County, Calif.