9/11 Suit Against Saudi Arabia Can Go to Trial

Information uncovered by plaintiffs undermined F.B.I.’s conclusion that two U.S.-based Saudi officials “unwittingly” helped al-Qaeda hijackers.

By Tim Golden
ProPublica

More than two decades after victims of the 9/11 attacks began trying to hold the government of Saudi Arabia responsible for helping the Qaeda terrorists who carried out the plot, a federal judge has ruled that a civil lawsuit against the kingdom can go to trial.

The decision on Thursday, by Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, represents a crucial victory for survivors of the attacks and relatives of the 2,977 people who were killed.

“This is a historic win for the families,” said a spokesperson for the families, Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going to be held accountable.”

A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Fahad Nazer, did not respond to requests for comment on the judge’s ruling.

“This is a historic win for the families. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going to be held accountable.”

The Saudi kingdom, which has long rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, could still appeal Daniels’ decision under special protections that are afforded to foreign governments in federal law, legal experts said. However, they added that the Saudi government might be willing to consider a settlement with the plaintiffs to avoid the scrutiny of a major trial and the expansive discovery of information that it would bring.

Already, information uncovered by plaintiffs has rewritten the history of the Sept. 11 plot as it was presented in the years after the attacks by the George W. Bush administration and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.

Most significantly, the plaintiffs’ evidence has undermined the F.B.I.’s conclusion that two Saudi officials in Southern California — one a part-time spy, the other a religious official with diplomatic status — acted “unwittingly” when they helped the first Qaeda hijackers who arrived in the United States.

In an email, the F.B.I. also declined to comment on the judge’s ruling.

It has long been established that in the years before 9/11, some members of the Saudi royal family and some powerful Saudi officials had supported militant Islamist movements and gave money to Islamic charities that in turn helped finance al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.

However, both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. emphasized in the aftermath of the attacks that the Saudi royal family was an enemy of al-Qaeda and its banished leader, Osama bin Laden, and that senior officials of the government had not assisted the group.

The litigation in New York focused on the roles of two lower-level Saudi officials living in the United States. One, Omar al-Bayoumi, was a middle-aged graduate student in San Diego who had long worked for the Saudi civil aviation agency. The other, Fahad al-Thumairy, was a religious official serving in Los Angeles as an imam at a new Saudi-funded mosque and as a diplomat at the Saudi Consulate.

The F.B.I. quickly determined that Bayoumi met the first two hijackers near the mosque soon after they flew into Los Angeles in January 2000 and that he helped them rent an apartment in San Diego, open a bank account and buy a car.

Bayoumi also introduced the two jihadists — who knew no one in the United States, spoke virtually no English and had no experience of living in the West — to a group of Muslim men who provided them with crucial support over the months that they lived in the city.

Bayoumi moved his family to Birmingham, England, in the summer of 2001. Within days of the attacks, he was detained and questioned by the British police at the F.B.I.’s request before being allowed to return to Saudi Arabia.

In a search of Bayoumi’s home, the British authorities turned up documents, notebooks, videotapes and computer files that they shared with the F.B.I., officials said. But only in the last two years did lawyers for the 9/11 families obtain much of that cache — and then only from the British government.

From the start, U.S. investigators were skeptical of Bayoumi’s account. In the end, though, the F.B.I. largely accepted his claims that he met the two Qaeda operatives by chance, helped them as he would any compatriots and had no idea of their terrorist plans. Both Bayoumi and the Saudi government insisted repeatedly that he had no ties to Saudi intelligence.

Despite the efforts of a small group of F.B.I. agents to pursue the case, it was eventually closed by the bureau. The civil lawsuit nearly died in 2016, when President Barack Obama vetoed legislation to carve out an exception to the sovereign immunity of foreign governments and permit the families to sue the Saudi kingdom. Congress overrode that veto, however, allowing the suit to go forward.

President Donald Trump later blocked the families from obtaining classified government documents on the 9/11 investigations, claiming they were state secrets. President Joe Biden later reversed that stance and declassified documents that included reporting confirming that Bayoumi was a part-time agent of the Saudi intelligence service.

The evidence that plaintiffs’ lawyers obtained from the British government has proved even more powerful.

It included videotapes in which Bayoumi was filmed touring Washington before the 9/11 attacks with two visiting Saudi religious officials who had extensive ties to militants. In one of the tapes, he filmed the U.S. Capitol, describing its layout and security to an unidentified audience. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggested that Bayoumi and his companions were “casing” the target for Qaeda plotters; the Saudi government insisted in court that it was a tourist video.

In his ruling, Daniels noted that the two sides had different interpretations of almost every piece of evidence. But he endorsed the plaintiffs’ views of several key exhibits, including a diagram of an airplane found in one of Bayoumi’s notebooks. Citing aviation experts, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the drawing and the calculations beside it showed how a plane might hit an object on the ground. The Saudis’ lawyers suggested that Bayoumi had drawn it while helping his son with homework.

Daniels said the plaintiffs’ evidence created “a high probability as to Bayoumi and Thumairy’s roles in the hijackers’ plans, and the related role of their employer,” the Saudi government. “In many instances,” he added, “it even appeared that Bayoumi actively injected himself” into the hijackers’ illicit activities. 

Tim Golden is a reporter at ProPublica, concentrating on national security, foreign policy and criminal justice.

This article is from ProPublica and republished under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

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