Iran Was Holding Bin Laden Son-In-Law Abu Ghaith, US Officials Say

Photo Credit: Getty ImagesU.S. officials say Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, captured last month in Turkey and now in New York, has spent most of the last decade in Iran, in some sort of confinement.

Back in late 2001, as U.S. troops and Afghan tribal forces were dismantling the Taliban control of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden made a decision.

He sent his operators, people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Zubaydah to the cities of Pakistan where they were to hide out and plan further attacks against the US. All of the key players were captured or killed, with the exception of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s No. 2 who remains at large, having survived at least three Predator attacks.

At the same time, bin Laden sent his top managers, al-Qaida’s Management Council, to Iran, arming them with money to bribe their way across the border, according to multiple US and Iranian officials. Bin Laden apparently hoped that the Iranians would see the group not as Sunni terrorists but as “an enemy of my enemy,” as one senior U.S. official put it.

Among those who made their way into Iran were Saif al-Adel, al-Qaida’s military director; bin Laden’s son Saad; and Abu Ghaith, the group’s communications director … and also bin Laden’s son-in-law. At one point not long after its arrival, this group, numbering in the hundreds with family members and bodyguards, was captured by Iranian authorities. Although senior U.S. officials have told NBC News they did not know the conditions of their confinement — “it was the blackest of black boxes,” one former senior U.S. official told NBC News — Iranian officials said the group was “in jail.”

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