A trove of evidence seized by British authorities from the home of a Saudi national with ties to the Sept. 11 Al Qaeda hijackers is now being made public for the first time as part of a long-running lawsuit against the kingdom’s government by the families of some of the victims.
Former U.S. intelligence officials say the new evidence could change the story of the 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, and of the possible involvement in the plot of Omar al-Bayoumi, the Saudi national. The officials also question why some of the evidence was not shared with the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan group of lawmakers and experts who were tasked with writing the definitive account of the attacks.
Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., said that Congress or the Justice Department should investigate the apparent lapse in processing the evidence. “What happened to this stuff after it was turned over to the F.B.I.?” he asked in an interview.
The F.B.I. declined to comment.
George Tenet, who led the C.I.A. at the time of the attacks, said that the new evidence was significant enough to require further evaluation, according to a spokesman. “The 9/11 families deserve no less,” Mr. Tenet said through the spokesman.
Ten days after the attacks, British police officers raided the home of Mr. al-Bayoumi, the Saudi national who had met two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Los Angeles shortly after they arrived in early 2000 and who later helped them rent an apartment and get settled in San Diego. Among the items the officers seized was a pad on which Mr. al-Bayoumi had sketched an airplane in blue ink. Above the airplane, he had written out a mathematical equation.
Over the next few months, British authorities turned the al-Bayoumi material over to the F.B.I. to assist in its investigation of the attacks. But it is unclear what happened to the plane drawing after that. Ten years would pass before the bureau had an expert analyze the equation and discover its potential significance. The expert found it could be used to help calculate the rate at which a plane would need to descend in order to hit a target on the horizon.
The 9/11 Commission was unaware of the drawing, according to Philip Zelikow, its executive director. Otherwise, “we would have asked Bayoumi about it in our interviews of him,” he said, in an interview by email.
In a Manhattan federal courtroom last week, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers revealed for the first time that Mr. al-Bayoumi had said in a 2021 deposition that the plane diagram was indeed his. When the defense offered a theory that the diagram was part of a homework assignment for Mr. al-Bayoumi’s teenage son, Judge George B. Daniels, who sits in the Southern District of New York, was skeptical.
“If he didn’t testify that this belonged to his 14-year-old son, why should we suppose that it does?” Judge Daniels asked.
The lawsuit by the victims’ families dates back to 2002. It has been through many appeals and a congressional intervention to limit Saudi Arabia’s sovereign immunity. To prevail, the plaintiffs must show not only that agents of the Saudi government assisted the hijackers, but that they did so within the scope of their official duties. The case turns largely on whether the assistance that the hijackers received from Mr. al-Bayoumi and others after they came to California was part of an orchestrated Al Qaeda plot.
None of the new evidence from Mr. al-Bayoumi’s home conclusively proves that the Saudi government enabled the attacks, but it adds to a growing circumstantial case. The newly disclosed material is bolstered by thousands of pages of F.B.I. documents from an investigation that sought to settle the question of official Saudi involvement in Sept. 11, which were declassified in 2021 by the Biden administration.
The investigation, known as Operation Encore, was closed without charges filed. Some agents who had worked on the case disagreed with the decision to close it. Now, in retirement, they are consulting for the plaintiffs on the lawsuit.
In San Diego, Mr. al-Bayoumi worked as an accountant for a Saudi aviation company that is also a defendant in the lawsuit. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied that Mr. al-Bayoumi was a government agent, but by 2017, according to the declassified F.B.I. documents, the bureau had confirmed that he was an informal agent of Saudi intelligence services.
Mr. al-Bayoumi has long maintained that his first meeting with the two hijackers, at a Los Angeles restaurant, occurred by chance. The F.B.I., on the other hand, turned up evidence suggesting that the meeting might have been arranged. After he was detained and interviewed by British authorities in 2001, Mr. al-Bayoumi moved back to Saudi Arabia, where he has resided since.
Another piece of new evidence found at Mr. al-Bayoumi’s former home in Birmingham, England, has emerged: video that he shot in 1999 of the U.S. Capitol, one of the buildings likely targeted by Al Qaeda terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks. The video shows the Capitol from various sides, with entrances, exits, parking facilities and security guards.
Mr. al-Bayoumi can be heard on the video calling the Capitol “the most important building.” He refers to people on the National Mall as “the demons of the White House.” He mentions a “plan.”
The Capitol video, first reported in June by “60 Minutes,” bears the hallmarks of preparations for a terrorist attack, said Mr. Morell. “This is a casing video,” he said. “Bayoumi was either Al Qaeda himself, or he was working for them,” he said.
Mr. Tenet, through his spokesman, said that he was not made aware of the Capitol video or the plane diagram during his years at the C.I.A.
The 9/11 Commission did not find that Mr. al-Bayoumi had assisted with the attacks. Mr. Zelikow said that the conclusions drawn by the commission’s 2004 report were dependent on the evidence available at that time.
The post Video and Airplane Sketch Raise New Questions About Saudi Ties to 9/11 appeared first on New York Times.
