At Least Two Saudi Officers May per chance well per chance additionally Occupy Deliberately Assisted 9/11 Hijackers, Recent Proof Suggests

From the delivery of U.S. investigations into the terrorist assaults of 11th of September, 2001, the question of whether the Saudi executive would possibly presumably well per chance had been eager has hovered over the case.

The FBI, after the most huge criminal probe in its history, concluded that a low-stage Saudi legit who helped the first two hijackers in California met them by likelihood and aided them unwittingly. The CIA said it saw no proof of a increased-stage Saudi role. The bipartisan 9/11 commission adopted these findings. A tiny FBI team continued to dig into the question, turning up knowledge that raised doubts a pair of few of these conclusions.

But now, 23 years after the assaults, unique proof has emerged to counsel extra strongly than ever that no lower than two Saudi officers deliberately assisted the first Qaida hijackers after they arrived within the US in January 2000.

Whether or not the Saudis knew the males had been terrorists remains unclear. However the unique knowledge reveals that each officers worked with Saudi and other non secular figures who had ties to al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

Quite a lot of the proof has been gathered in a prolonged-operating federal lawsuit in opposition to the Saudi executive by survivors of the assaults and kinfolk of of us that died. That lawsuit has reached a serious second, with a settle in Recent York preparing to rule on a Saudi motion to brush off the case.

Already, though, knowledge suggest within the plaintiffs’ case — which entails movies, mobile phone data and other paperwork that had been quiet soon after the assaults however had been never shared with key investigators — argues for a basic reassessment of the Saudi executive’s that you’ll be in a position to be ready to evaluate involvement with the hijackers.

The courtroom data also elevate questions about whether the FBI and CIA, which persistently brushed apart the significance of Saudi links to the hijackers, mishandled or deliberately downplayed proof of the kingdom’s that you’ll be in a position to be ready to evaluate complicity within the assaults that killed 2,977 of us and injured thousands extra.

“Why is this data coming out now?” requested retired FBI agent Daniel Gonzalez, who pursued the Saudi connections for nearly 15 years. “We ought to indulge in had all of this three or four weeks after 9/11.”

Saudi officers indulge in prolonged denied any involvement within the area, emphasizing that they had been at warfare with al-Qaida smartly prior to 2001.

They’ve also leaned on earlier U.S. assessments, especially the one-web page abstract of a joint FBI-CIA document that modified into publicly released by the Bush administration in 2005. That abstract said there modified into no proof that “the Saudi Executive or participants of the Saudi royal household knowingly equipped toughen” for the assaults.

Pages of the document that had been declassified in 2022 are extra serious of the Saudi role, describing huge Saudi funding for Islamic charities linked to al-Qaida and the reluctance of senior Saudi officers to cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

The plaintiffs’ myth quiet leaves critical gaps within the account of how two identified al-Qaida operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, refrained from CIA surveillance foreign, flew into Los Angeles below their very indulge in names after which — no topic speaking no English and ostensibly interesting no one — settled in Southern California to begin preparing for the assaults.

Silent, the lawsuit has uncovered layers of contradictions and deceit within the Saudi executive’s portrayal of Omar al-Bayoumi, a heart-aged Saudi graduate pupil in San Diego who modified into the central resolve within the hijackers’ toughen community.

Almost right away after the 9/11 assaults, FBI brokers identified Bayoumi as having helped the 2 young Saudis rent an condominium, location up a bank myth and indulge in other wants. Bayoumi, then 42, modified into arrested on Sept. 21, 2001, in Birmingham, England, where he had moved to continue graduate experiences in exchange. Scotland Yard terrorism investigators wondered him for a week in London as two FBI brokers monitored the classes.

Bayoumi dissembled from the delivery, newly released transcripts of the interrogations expose. He said he barely remembered the 2 Qaida operatives, having met them by likelihood in a halal cafe within the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City, after he stopped on the Saudi Consulate to renew his passport. The proof reveals he in actuality renewed his passport the day prior to the encounter within the cafe, thought to be one of many indications that his meeting with the hijackers modified into planned.

After stress from Saudi diplomats, Bayoumi modified into freed by the British authorities with out being charged. U.S. officers did not try to indulge in him extradited.

Two years later, in Saudi Arabia, Bayoumi sat for interviews with the FBI and the 9/11 commission that had been overseen by Saudi intelligence officers. All every other time, he insisted that he modified into proper being hospitable to the hijackers. He knew nothing of their plans, he said, and modified into in opposition to violent jihad.

Gonzalez and other FBI brokers had been dubious. Even supposing Bayoumi modified into supposedly a pupil, he did nearly no discovering out. He modified into a ways extra active in developing a Saudi-funded mosque in San Diego and spreading money throughout the Muslim neighborhood. (The Saudi executive paid him surreptitiously thru an aviation-services and products company in Houston.)

FBI officers in Washington permitted the Saudi depiction of Bayoumi as an amiable, a piece bumbling executive accountant searching to enhance his expertise, and as a non secular however moderate Muslim — and never a seek for. The lead agent on the FBI team that investigated him, Jacqueline Maguire, told the 9/11 commission that by “all indications,” Bayoumi’s reference to the hijackers had been the outcomes of “a random encounter” on the cafe.

The 9/11 commission permitted that overview. The commission’s investigators smartly-known Bayoumi’s “obliging and gregarious” manner in interviews and called him “an not going candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.” The panel stumbled on “no credible proof that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.”

But in 2017, the FBI concluded that Bayoumi modified into, in truth, a Saudi seek for — though it kept that discovering secret until 2022, after President Joe Biden ordered companies to declassify extra paperwork from the 9/11 data.

Exactly whom within the Saudi executive Bayoumi modified into working for remains unclear. FBI reports dispute him as a “cooptee,” or piece-time agent, of the Saudi intelligence service, however hiss he reported to the kingdom’s noteworthy aged ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. (Lawyers for the Saudi executive indulge in continued to repeat Bayoumi’s earlier denials that he ever had “any assignment” for Saudi intelligence.)

One other layer of Bayoumi’s hidden identity has emerged from paperwork, videotapes and other affords that had been seized from his home and placement of enterprise on the time of his arrest in England. The plaintiffs had sought that knowledge from the Justice Division for years however received nearly nothing until the British authorities started sharing their copies of the topic topic in 2023.

Even though Saudi officers recount that Bayoumi merely volunteered at a local mosque, the British proof points to his deeper collaboration with the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The Saudi royals had established the ministry in 1993 as piece of a governing pact with the noteworthy clergy. In return for political toughen, they gave the clerics effective aid watch over over domestic non secular matters and funded their efforts to unfold their fundamentalist Wahhabi impress of Islam foreign.

From the delivery of the FBI’s 9/11 investigation, brokers pored over a short excerpt of a videotape recorded at a event that Bayoumi hosted for some two dozen Muslim males in February 2000, soon after Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in San Diego.

It modified into one other twist of fate, Bayoumi claimed, that he held the match within the hijackers’ condominium. The 2 young Saudis had nothing in truth to realize with the gathering, he said, however he wished to retain his partner and other females in his indulge in condominium, sequestered from male guests in line with conservative Muslim custom.

The FBI did not part a elephantine copy of the VHS recording with either its indulge in area brokers or the 9/11 families, who sought it persistently. (An FBI spokesperson declined to touch upon the bureau’s handling of the Bayoumi proof.) However the elephantine recording modified into equipped to the plaintiffs by the British police last December.

The longer version casts Bayoumi’s gathering in a completely different gentle. Even though the nominal guest of honor is a visiting Saudi cleric, the 2 hijackers are in moderation presented to the other guests and are apparently on the heart of the proceedings.

After figuring out a total lot of the event guests for the first time, the plaintiffs’ attorneys had been ready to myth that many went on to play critical roles within the hijackers’ toughen community, helping them location up web and mobile phone service, join English classes and aquire a previous car.

“Bayoumi hand-picked these people due to he knew and assessed that they had been smartly-suited to manufacture the Al Qaeda operatives with crucial sorts of toughen,” the attorneys wrote of the event guests.

One other videotape taken from Bayoumi’s Birmingham house is even extra at odds with the image he conveyed to the FBI and the 9/11 commission. The video follows Bayoumi as he excursions Washington, D.C., with two visiting Saudi clerics early within the summer of 1999.

Lawyers for the Saudi executive called the recording an innocent keepsake — “a vacationer video that entails footage of artwork, flowerbeds, and a squirrel on the White Condo lawn.” However the plaintiffs’ attorneys posit a extra ominous motive, especially as Bayoumi specializes in his necessary area: an huge presentation of the Capitol constructing, which is shown from a sequence of vantage points and in relation to other Washington landmarks.

“We greet you, the esteemed brothers, and we welcome you from Washington,” Bayoumi says on the video. Later, standing prior to the camera, he reports as “Omar al-Bayoumi from Capitol Hill, the Capitol constructing.”

The footage reveals the Capitol from relatively about a angles, noting architectural points, entrances and the movement of safety guards. Bayoumi sprinkles his narration with non secular language and refers to a “belief.”

“Bayoumi’s video footage and his narration must not that of a vacationer,” the plaintiffs contend in a single courtroom myth, citing the evaluation of a aged FBI skilled. The video, they add, “bears the hallmarks of scare planning operations identified by regulations enforcement and counterterrorism investigators in operational movies seized from scare groups in conjunction with Al Qaeda.”

Lawyers for the Saudi executive brushed apart this conclusion as preposterous.

However the video’s timing is great. In step with the 9/11 commission document, Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders started discussing their “planes operation” within the spring of 1999. Even though they disagreed on which U.S. landmarks to strike, the document states, “all of them wished to hit the Capitol.”

The 2 Saudi clerics who joined Bayoumi on the outing, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy, had been so-called propagators — emissaries of the Islamic Affairs ministry despatched to proselytize in a international country. U.S. investigators later linked them to a handful of Islamist militants.

Most notably, Sudairy, whom Bayoumi describes as the emir, or chief, of the Washington outing, spent loads of months residing in Columbia, Missouri, with Ziyad Khaleel, a Palestinian-American al-Qaida member who delivered a satellite tv for computer mobile phone to bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. The Qaida chief previous the mobile phone to coordinate the lethal bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, FBI officers indulge in said.

Sudairy and Sadhan, who had diplomatic fetch 22 situation, had beforehand visited California, working with Bayoumi and staying at a tiny San Diego guesthouse where the hijackers later lived. Many unique crucial points of their travels had been revealed within the British paperwork. The 2 Saudis had beforehand denied even interesting Bayoumi, thought to be one of many faux claims in depositions coordinated by the Saudi executive.

The unique proof also reveals that Sadhan and Sudairy worked with the other key Saudi legit linked to the hijackers, the cleric Fahad al-Thumairy. In step with one FBI supply, it modified into Thumairy, the 32-365 days-extinct imam of a prominent Saudi mosque in Culver City, who received the hijackers after they arrived on Jan. 15, 2000, and arranged for his or her short-timeframe housing and other wants.

Thumairy, a Ministry of Islamic Affairs legit who modified into also assigned to the Saudi consulate, insisted he had no reminiscence of Hazmi and Mihdhar, though the three had been viewed together by loads of FBI informants. Thumairy also denied interesting Bayoumi, no topic mobile phone data that expose no lower than five dozen calls between them. Thumairy’s diplomatic visa modified into withdrawn by the Advise Division in 2003 thanks to his suspected involvement with terrorist job.

In an huge evaluation of mobile phone data produced by the FBI and the British authorities, the plaintiffs also documented what they called patterns of coordination fascinating Bayoumi, Thumairy and other Saudi officers. (Lawyers for the Saudi executive said the calls had been about mundane non secular matters.)

Two weeks prior to the hijackers’ arrival, as an illustration, the tips expose calls among Bayoumi, Thumairy and the Islamic Affairs director on the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Bayoumi and Thumairy also made relatively about a calls spherical that point to a smartly-known Yemeni American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who later emerged as a truly crucial Qaida chief in Yemen.

It has prolonged been identified that Awlaki, who modified into killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011, had some contact with Hazmi and Mihdhar in San Diego and met two other 9/11 hijackers after transferring to a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. But many FBI investigators believed he modified into radicalized smartly after 9/11 and wouldn’t indulge in identified the hijackers’ plans.

Recent proof filed within the courtroom case points to a extra critical relationship. Awlaki looks to indulge in met Hazmi and Mihdhar as soon as they arrived in San Diego. He joined Bayoumi in helping them rent an condominium and placement up bank accounts, and he modified into viewed by others to indulge in served as a relied on non secular consultant.

Awlaki’s worldview “matched relatively carefully to al-Qaida’s on the time,” said Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a biographer of Awlaki who served as an skilled for the plaintiffs. “The unique knowledge now changing into public, on top of what we already learn about his teachings and associations, makes it cheap to total that Awlaki knew the hijackers had been piece of the al-Qaeda community.”