Crown Prince Nayef, interior minister since 1975 and thought to be 78, was the heir to Saudi King Abdullah and was appointed crown prince in October after the death of his elder brother, Crown Prince Sultan. He is among the nearly 40 sons of Saudi Arabia's founder, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who established the kingdom in 1935.
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The Crown Prince had a reputation for being a conservative: he was believed to be closer than many of his brothers to the powerful Wahhabi religious establishment that gives legitimacy to the royal family, and at times he worked to give a freer hand to the religious police who enforce strict social rules.
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Soon after becoming crown prince, he vowed at a conference of clerics that Saudi Arabia would "never sway from and never compromise on" its adherence to the puritanical, ultraconservative Wahhabi doctrine. The ideology, he proclaimed "is the source of the kingdom's pride, success and progress."
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The 9/11 attacks at first strained ties between the two allies. For months, the kingdom refused to acknowledge any of its citizens were involved in the suicide airline bombings, until finally Prince Nayef became the first Saudi official to publicly confirm that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, in a February 2002 interview.
But later that year he told an Arabic-language Kuwaiti daily that Jews were behind the attacks, because they had benefited from subsequent criticism of Islam and Arabs. He came under heavy criticism in the U.S., especially because he was the man in charge of Saudi investigations into the attack.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/9335702/Death-of-Saudi-Crown-Prince-Nayef-who-led-crackdown-on-al-Qaeda-raises-questions-over-succession.html
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