Families of 9/11 victims will press a federal appeals court in October to weigh newly unsealed videos they say finally tie Saudi Arabia to the attacks.
Brett Eagleson, president of the advocacy group 9/11 Justice, whose father died in the South Tower, is leading the push to hold the Kingdom accountable. About 10,000 family members have joined the suit, and oral arguments before a Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel in lower Manhattan are set for Oct. 7. The plaintiffs hope to persuade judges that evidence kept hidden for decades is strong enough to continue their years-long legal battle against a powerful U.S. Ally.
The evidence centers on Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national with murky government ties who helped secure California lodging for two American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers. Federal investigators have long scrutinized his connections; a 2017 FBI memo placed him on the payroll of Saudi intelligence. He left the U.S. For the UK about a year before the attacks, was questioned at American request by British authorities, and was never charged. He eventually returned to Saudi Arabia.
One video, seized by British authorities just ten days after 9/11 and handed to U.S. Investigators, remained sealed until 2024. It shows al-Bayoumi filming the U.S. Capitol and discussing what he calls a “plan.” Plaintiffs’ lawyers say he was “casing” the building, with roughly 30 minutes of the hour-long footage devoted to its entrances, security procedures, and even interior columns. The timing matters: filming began in June 1999, coinciding with when U.S. Intelligence says Osama bin Laden gave the order for the aircraft attack.
“These pieces of evidence demonstrate that Bayoumi had foreknowledge of what the hijackers’ role and intent was,” Eagleson said in a statement. “What these videos and what this evidence suggests and proves is that Bayoumi was in constant contact with higher and more senior Saudi government officials.”
Former FBI special agent Bassem Youssef provided expert testimony that al-Bayoumi’s Arabic-language comments in the video “bears the hallmarks of terror planning operations.” The 2004 9/11 Commission report found a high probability that the Capitol was United Flight 93’s intended target before it crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. That same report concluded there was “no credible evidence” al-Bayoumi aided extremists and called him an “unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement” — though its drafters lacked access to the “casing” video, plaintiffs’ lawyers have argued.
Terri Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United, has been blunt about why the footage stayed buried.
“They buried it,” she said.
“It’s a very key piece of evidence, because it’s been verified by CIA analysts that that was a casing video,” Strada added.
A second video captures the California “welcome party” al-Bayoumi threw on Feb. 17, 2000 for hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Shot inside the same San Diego apartment the pair rented after al-Bayoumi introduced them to their landlord, it briefly shows al-Mihdhar in the kitchen. The gathering included 29 men, and al-Bayoumi told attendees that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar would “soon be traveling.” Plaintiffs’ lawyers contend the event signaled their “special status” and provided what they termed a “cocoon” of support, arguing al-Bayoumi was running an “extremist cell” as an “agent” of Saudi Arabia under “deep cover.”
The paper trail deepens the connections. Al-Bayoumi’s notebook, seized alongside the videos in Birmingham, England on Sept. 20, 2001, contains a sketch of a plane beside mathematical calculations that a plaintiffs’ expert witness identifies as a flight calculation for viewing an object on the horizon from the air. The federal government no longer possesses it; authorities returned the notebook to al-Bayoumi in 2002. According to a plaintiffs’ filing, it “was not produced by Saudi Arabia or Bayoumi in this litigation,” and they want the Kingdom to “make the original notepad available in its entirety for inspection.”
The Saudi government, the world’s second-largest oil producer, has consistently denied any role in planning the attacks that killed 2,977 people. The Post contacted the Saudi embassy in Washington seeking additional comment about the case.
Whether the evidence was deliberately suppressed or simply lost in bureaucratic shuffle remains unclear, though family advocates strongly suspect the former. What is certain is that material seized within days of the attacks took 23 years to reach a courtroom, and that a panel of federal judges will now decide if it is enough to let 10,000 grieving families keep pressing their case against a foreign power.
The original incident that spawned this litigation remains the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, 19 hijackers seized four commercial jets, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York and one into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Passengers aboard the fourth plane, United Flight 93, fought back and forced it down in a Pennsylvania field before it could reach its target. The vast majority of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, yet the 9/11 Commission found no direct evidence that senior Saudi officials or the government as an institution funded al-Qaeda, leaving victims’ families to pursue their own legal avenues for accountability.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel will hear oral arguments in lower Manhattan on Oct. 7.