US : The Justice Department has made the extremely rare move of intervening in a court case against a former top Saudi intelligence official who has been targeted by Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince, in order to protect classified intelligence secrets.
If the court case is allowed to proceed, the Justice Department said in a motion filed Tuesday, it could lead to “the disclosure of information that could reasonably be expected to damage the national security of the United States.”
The case was brought against Saad Aljabri, a former top Saudi counterterrorism official who is widely respected by US intelligence and counterterrorism officials and credited by them with saving hundreds, maybe thousands, of American lives.
Aljabri — who fled to Canada in 2017 — became a nemesis of the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, after working for years alongside the country’s head of counterterrorism, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who was a rival of Salman’s for the throne.
A group of Saudi companies owned by the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, which the prince controls, then brought embezzlement cases against Aljabri, first in Canada and now the United States.
Aljabri denies the accusations and accuses the prince, known as MBS, of sending an assassination squad to Canada to try to kill him and of holding two of his children hostage in Saudi Arabia.
CNN
