THE FBI is investigating how funds from a senior member of the Saudi Royal Family found their way indirectly to two of the September 11 suicide hijackers.

A Saudi spokesman said yesterday that the wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador to Washington, had unwittingly paid $2,000 a month to a woman who has since been identified as the wife of a student who befriended the attackers in the United States. He said that the woman, Magda Ibrahim Ahmed, gave some of Princess Haifa al-Faisal’s cheques to her husband and that she may also have given at least one payment to the wife of a second student, Omar al-Bayoumi.

Mr al-Bayoumi is said to have helped two men to set themselves up in San Diego, California, in early 2000. The next year the men were part of the five-strong group that hijacked an American Airlines passenger aircraft and crashed it into the Pentagon.

A senior US official confirmed yesterday that an FBI investigation into Saudi financial support for the hijackers had been going on for months. But he said there could be an innocent explanation for the link to Princess Haifa — it is common for wealthy Saudis to fund poorer compatriots in the United States. The Saudi spokesman said that the kingdom had assisted the FBI in its work and would continue to do so. “Princess Haifa is a generous woman who goes out of her way to help people in need,” Adel al-Jubeir, foreign policy spokesman for Crown Prince Abdullah, told ABC television’s Sunday talk show This Week.

Saudi Arabia has come under increasing scrutiny in Washington for exporting a fundamentalist form of Islam, called Wahabism, which is also espoused by Osama bin Laden. The kingdom stripped bin Laden of his Saudi citizenship in an effort to distance itself from him. It is also accused of turning a blind eye to popular support for bin Laden’s cause among its people. Fourteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens.

Senator John McCain, a Republican who lost to George W. Bush in his bid to run for President, said yesterday that he doubted that Princess Haifa had meant to help terrorists. “But . . . the Saudis have been engaged in a Faustian bargain with the radical Islamic fundamentalists for many, many years in order to stay on the throne.”

The Saudi spokesman said that his country had learnt only on Saturday that the woman that Princess Haifa helped was married to the student, Osama Basnan, who befriended the attackers. Mr Basnan was a close associate of Mr al-Bayoumi, whose family started receiving payments into its bank account in early 2000, Newsweek reported on Saturday. A few months earlier the Pentagon attackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had arrived in Los Angeles from an al-Qaeda planning summit in Malaysia.

Within days of their arrival, Mr al-Bayoumi befriended them. He threw a party for them and allegedly guaranteed their lease on a flat next door to his own in San Diego and paid $1,500 to cover their first two months’ rent. The report of the payments came to light only because of an inquiry by members of Congress into the September 11 attacks.

Yesterday the White House defended the FBI investigation into the payments, but the move will have embarrassed President Bush, who is close to Prince Bandar and has entertained him at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

For two decades, Prince Bandar has weathered scandals in America’s long love-hate relationship with Saudi Arabia. But today the doyen of the diplomatic corps will need all his skills to survive the allegations. Before the Gulf War, he was credited with helping to persuade Saudi Arabia to allow US forces to use its territory for the liberation of Kuwait. He also brokered a deal over Lockerbie with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

After September 11, he helped to move bin Laden family members from the United States. They are a prominent Saudi clan who have sought to distance themselves from Osama.

The new revelations could harm the Administration’s efforts to enlist Saudi support for an attack on Iraq. Saudi Arabia allowed the US to use its territory as a base during the Gulf War but has proved less willing to help in another war against Iraq.

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