Two chilling videos kept out of sight for decades could be the key to persuading a court next month that Saudi Arabia was behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and that victims’ families have amassed enough evidence to continue their years-long legal battle, according to family members of victims.
Federal Appeals Court judges in lower Manhattan will hear oral arguments for the first time Oct. 7 that connect the men in those videos to the Saudi government and its intelligence services, as well as the horrific attacks of that day.
Both videos involve the same enigmatic figure, Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who helped secure California lodging for a pair of American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers – but who left the country for the UK about a year before the attacks.
He was questioned at the request of the US and held by British authorities, but was never charged, and eventually moved back to Saudi Arabia.
Now, about 10,000 family members of 9/11 victims who have joined in the suit want to use that evidence to persuade a Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel that it is finally time to find the Saudi government accountable and that the evidence is strong enough to do so.
“These pieces of evidence demonstrate that Bayoumi had foreknowledge of what the hijackers’ role and intent was,” said Brett Eagleson, president of 9/11 Justice, a group that successfully pushed legislation to allow Americans to sue foreign governments for damages.
“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,” said Eagleson, whose father died in the South Tower on 9/11.
One video shows al-Bayoumi, who had murky government ties and a web of official contacts, and who according to a 2017 FBI memo was on the payroll of Saudi intelligence – filming the US Capitol and talking about a “plan.”
Plaintiffs say he made it at the behest of Al Qaeda.
Lawyers for the victims’ families say al-Bayoumi was “casing” the building – with 30 minutes of footage of the hour-long video revealing the iconic building’s entrances, showing its security procedures, and even its interior columns.
The 2004 9/11 Commission report said there was a high probability that the Capitol was the intended target of United Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, PA.
That report also found there was “no credible evidence” that al-Bayoumi aided extremists and called him an “unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement” with them – although its drafters say they didn’t have access to the “casing” video, lawyers argued in court
Former FBI special agent Bassem Youssef provided expert testimony to the lawyers that al-Bayoumi’s Arabic language comments in the videos “bears the hallmarks of terror planning operations.” The timing of when he filmed it — beginning in June 1999 — coincides with when US intelligence says Osama bin Laden gave the order for the attack on the US using aircraft.
It was unsealed in court in 2024 despite being seized just 10 days after the 2001 attacks by British authorities and being handed over to US investigators. It still isn’t clear if it was kept under wraps on purpose or, as some family advocates suspect, to shield a powerful ally.
“They buried it,” claimed Terri Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United.
“It’s a very key piece of evidence, because it’s been verified by CIA analysts that that was a casing video,” claimed Strada.
Another video shows the California “welcome party” al-Bayoumi threw for two 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.
That video shows al-Bayoumi hosting a Feb. 17, 2000 gathering for community members that signaled their “special status” – providing what attorneys for 10,000 9/11 family members called a “cocoon” of support.
The video of the party, shown inside the same San Diego apartment that the hijackers rented from an unsuspecting landlord after an introduction from al-Bayoumi, briefly shows hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar in the kitchen.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers argued in court it proves he was operating an “extremist cell” as an “agent” of Saudi Arabia under “deep cover.”
Bayoumi said at the welcome party, which included 29 men, that Hazmi and Mihdhar would “soon be traveling.”
Then there is the paper trail and string of connections between al-Bayoumi and Saudi authorities. The Saudi Government, an influential US ally and the world’s second largest oil producer, has long denied any role whatsoever in the planning of the 9/11 terror attacks that killed 2,977.
The Post contacted the Saudi embassy in Washington seeking additional comment about the case.
Al-Bayoumi’s notebook, seized along with the videos by UK authorities in Birmingham, England on Sept. 20, 2001, includes a tiny sketch of a plane next to mathematical calculations that an expert witness for plaintiffs says is a flight calculation for viewing an object on the horizon from the air.
The feds don’t even have the notebook with the plane sketch and calculations. Authorities gave it back to al-Bayoumi in 2002. The notebook “was not produced by Saudi Arabia or Bayoumi in this litigation,” according to a plaintiffs’ filing. They say the Kingdom “should make the original notepad available in its entirety for inspection.”
