West, Saudi Arabia relieved at death of al-Majed
5 January, 2014 – By Finian Cunningham – PressTV
One thing is for sure about the death of al-Qaeda commander Majed al-Majed in a Beirut hospital this weekend – Western and Saudi intelligence will be relieved at his demise.
Dead men don’t talk, as they say, and that fact may spare the United States, Britain and Saudi Arabia from incriminating disclosures that could have surfaced if he had stayed alive – disclosures that would expose their collusion in terrorist violence raging across the Middle East.
Inevitably, there will be suspicions that al-Majed – a Saudi national – was killed while in Lebanese custody. He was arrested by Lebanese intelligence personnel reportedly in the southern port city of Sidon only days before his death was announced on Saturday. During his brief period in custody he was undergoing questioning while suffering from chronic kidney disease.
Al-Majed’s career as a terrorist certainly gained him enough enemies seeking revenge. But keeping him alive would have been of more advantage to the Lebanese – and to his Hezbollah, Syrian and Iranian enemies – for the valuable information that could have been obtained about his al-Qaeda group, known as the Abdullah Azzam Brigade.
This so-called brigade was involved in terror attacks across the region, including Lebanon and Syria. While al-Majed’s outfit was on official terror lists of the US and Saudi Arabia, there is evidence that the group was less of an outlaw to these states and more of an agency for their covert aims.
Al-Majed’s group claimed responsibility for the deadly bomb attack on the Iranian embassy in Beirut on November 19. That attack killed at least 25 people, including the Iranian cultural attaché, Hojjatoleslam Ebrahim Ansari, and injured more than 150 others.
Of pressing interest about al-Majed’s organization are the covert links between his group and al-Qaeda generally, and its Western and Saudi sponsors. Any disclosures would have been acutely damaging to US, British and Saudi state intelligence.
Such information could have shed more light on the shadowy role of Saudi and Western intelligence in their covert support of the al-Qaeda terror network, not just in Lebanon, but also in neighboring Syria and Iraq. Violence in these countries has been escalating over the past three years, with a combined death toll well over 100,000.
For nearly three years, Western governments and the corporate media have been hawking a narrative that Syria’s violence is the result of the government forces of President Bashar al-Assad cracking down on a pro-democracy movement. Somehow, mysteriously in the Western version, the anti-government forces in Syria have now become dominated by “extremist jihadists”, whose violence is, in turn, “spilling over” into Iraq and Lebanon.
The Western narrative also lays blame on Iran and Russia for supporting Assad, as well as Shia Hezbollah as a factor provoking violence inside Lebanon.
However, despite this threadbare Western depiction, an increasingly more plausible account for the upsurge in regional violence is that systematic covert Western support for al-Qaeda affiliates has fuelled the growth of a Frankenstein terrorist monster, which is now running amok. …more