Florida Senator Bob Graham, the Democrat who co-chaired Congress's probe into the September 11 attacks, wrote that Saudi government agents were part of a support network in the United States for two hijackers who took part in the devastating strikes, the Miami Herald reported Sunday.

But President George W. Bush's administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation blocked Congress's investigation into the alleged ties, Graham wrote in "Intelligence Matters," a copy of which the Herald obtained.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry called for an immediate "independent investigation" into the allegations "to determine if the very agencies charged with investigating the war on terror have been compromised by White House politics."

"These are serious allegations being made by a well respected and informed leader," said Kerry, who is challenging the Republican president in the November 2 election.

"If the White House and the FBI did in fact block an investigation into the ties between the Saudi government and the 9-11 hijackers, then this would be a massive abuse of power," he said in a statement.

The congressional panel's staff concluded that Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassan, two Saudis living in San Diego, California, were Saudi government agents who gave significant financial support to two hijackers, wrote Graham, a former Democratic presidential candidate.

Al-Bayoumi was receiving money from a contractor for Saudi Civil Aviation, and his monthly allowance from 465 dollars to 3,700 dollars in March 2000, the book says.

His pay increased after he helped hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhdar find apartments and make contacts in San Diego before they took flying lessons, Graham wrote.

But Graham wrote that congressional staff were stopped by the White House and the FBI from conducting interviews for the investigation, according to the Herald.

"It was as if the president's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety," Graham wrote.

In his book, which is to be released Tuesday, Graham says some details of the agents' alleged financial support were part of 27 pages from the September 11 panel's final report that were blanked out by the White House, the Herald said.

But Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the independent commission that investigated the September 11 attacks, told Newsweek magazine that the non-congressional panel was able to interview Al-Bayoumi and cleared him of links with the hijackers.

The independent panel released its own report in July.

© 2004 Agence France-Presse

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