New videos of man in 9/11 lawsuit reveal extremist links

New videos of man in 9/11 lawsuit reveal extremist links

The man central to a $1 trillion (£733bn) lawsuit filed by 9/11 families had deep ties to Saudi government officials and went paintballing with one of al-Qaeda’s future leaders, BBC-obtained video shows.

The footage, which the FBI had within days of the 2001 attacks, sharply contradicts Omar al-Bayoumi’s 25 years of denials that he was an extremist and a Saudi spy.

In one clip, Bayoumi, who said he was a student while in the United States, is seen hugging Anwar al-Awlaki, who later became leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In another, Bayoumi and Awlaki are shown paintballing near San Diego with an official from Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs.

The videos are part of the 9/11 families’ case against Saudi Arabia and had never before been made public.

The lawsuit says Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attacks and that Bayoumi helped two of the 19 hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while another crashed in Pennsylvania.

Bayoumi was arrested in the UK by the Metropolitan Police days after the attacks, and the videos were discovered among his belongings, along with other key evidence.

That included a diagram of a plane with a flight descent equation written beside it.

Several FBI agents were given copies of the diagram, but it was never shown to British interrogators, even though it had been delivered to the police station where Bayoumi was being held.

The diagram was also withheld from some FBI agents investigating Bayoumi, as well as from the 9/11 Commission — the independent inquiry into the deadliest mass murder in US history, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed. Bayoumi was never charged.

He and the Saudi government did not reply to BBC requests for comment, but both have consistently denied any role in, or advance knowledge of, the attacks. The FBI declined to comment.

After a judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed in 2018, thousands of documents, plus videos and photographs, were released to the court and also declassified under an executive order issued by former President Joe Biden.

BBC Panorama and Radio 4 reviewed those records and interviewed dozens of special agents and investigators to trace the evidence the FBI gathered about Bayoumi and Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in 9/11 — and to understand why it was never fully pursued over 25 years.

Our investigation also found:

- The plane diagram was sent to the FBI’s New York office and analysed, according to an FBI source. But a US Department of Justice (DOJ) official told the BBC he was never shown a proposal to prosecute Bayoumi on the basis of the evidence, even though “we’ve convicted people for less”

- FBI agents in San Diego, where Bayoumi had lived in the US, repeatedly asked for copies of evidence but never received most of it

- The San Diego and Los Angeles FBI offices were both prevented from interviewing Bayoumi’s Saudi government contacts

- Staff on the 9/11 Commission objected to the conclusion that Bayoumi was “unlikely” to have been involved with extremists, prompting the report to attribute this to “our investigators who have dealt directly with him”

Omar al-Bayoumi arrived in San Diego from Saudi Arabia in 1994. He said he was studying English, but court records show that within a few years he had effectively given up his studies. He was more often seen organising religious events, frequently with a camcorder held to his eye.

One video Bayoumi recorded, from 1997 or early 1998, shows men including Anwar al-Awlaki paintballing. Filmed near San Diego, the group stages urban combat scenes and target practice, with many wearing military fatigues.

At one point, some of the men rush forward shouting “Allahu Akbar”. A visiting Saudi sheikh is with the group, and Bayoumi can also be heard addressing Anwar al-Awlaki as “Sheikh Anwar”.

Paintballing became a focus of FBI counter-terrorism investigations after 9/11, and the DOJ used paintball evidence in several terrorism prosecutions.

Omar al-Bayoumi and Anwar al-Awlaki took part in paintball sessions in San Diego for at least three years in the late 1990s and very early 2000s. When the FBI investigated after 9/11, agents were told some participants were using it to train for jihad.

Although Awlaki’s extremist preaching became more prominent after 9/11, when the paintball video was made he already had links to al-Qaeda operatives and was soon to be investigated by the FBI. He was killed in a CIA drone strike in 2011.

Saudi Arabia has said the paintball video does not show who “made” or “took” it. When questioned remotely in the 9/11 families’ lawsuit in 2021, Bayoumi insisted he had never met Awlaki. The video evidence contradicting that claim was only shared confidentially with the court a year later, and placed on the public docket on 4 September this year.

Another previously unreported clip shows Bayoumi embracing Awlaki in January 1998. Additional footage shows Bayoumi meeting repeatedly with officials and preachers from Riyadh’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs. He appears in a video with two ministry officials, one carrying a clipboard, at SeaWorld. Bayoumi hands the camera to his son and jumps into frame to record himself with them.

The Ministry of Islamic Affairs, established in 1993, was viewed as dominated by clerics who promoted a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam and spread it worldwide. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars globally building mosques and sent dozens of officials to the US, some of whom oversaw a network of hard-line preachers.

After the 9/11 attacks, Omar al-Bayoumi became an early suspect in the FBI investigation.

His name appeared on an apartment rental agreement signed by the first two hijackers to arrive in the United States, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were part of a five-man hijacking team that crashed a plane into the Pentagon.

The FBI traced Bayoumi to Birmingham, UK, where he had moved with his family before 9/11.

On 21 September 2001, officers from the Met Police’s Anti-Terror Branch Special Operations team arrested Bayoumi at one of his properties.

He was taken under blue lights to Paddington Green Police Station in London, where detectives began questioning him. Under UK law at the time, officers could hold him for only seven days without charge.

The next morning, in Birmingham, officers began the painstaking task of logging and bagging evidence from his properties — a haul of many thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of photographs, flight ticket stubs, phone cards, and carrier bags and boxes containing at least 80 videotapes.

Within hours of the search beginning, several pieces of documentary evidence — classified as top priority at the FBI’s direction — were taken by police straight to Paddington Green, where the FBI had placed an agent.

That evidence included a phone book listing more than two dozen names of Saudi government officials in the US and Saudi Arabia; flight simulator software; tickets and travel documents; and the yellow-lined page of a notebook with the sketch of a plane, which an officer marked: “contains handwritten notes mathematical calculations re height of planes”.

Eighteen years later, the FBI would hand that notebook page to the court in the 9/11 families’ lawsuit, after a subpoena.

“It’s the mathematical calculation of the crash,” Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a member of the 9/11 families’ legal team, told the BBC. “When we figured out what it was, we knew that it was the smoking gun that we’d been looking for.”

The equation, written in Omar al-Bayoumi’s handwriting, shows the height and distance needed for a pilot to steer an aircraft toward a specific object on the ground. Beneath it is a small drawing of a plane and a set of numbers.

Last year, the federal judge in the families’ lawsuit found that the notebook page, on its face, “connects Bayoumi with knowledge of the 9/11 Attacks”.

In 2021, when asked about it by the court, Bayoumi said he had the diagram because he liked finding equations and could not remember when he had written it.

The plane diagram was “the smoking gun”, says lawyer for 9/11 families Jodi Westbook Flowers

By the evening of 22 September 2001, copies of the plane diagram were in London in the possession of both the FBI and UK counter-terror police — and only metres from the custody suite where Omar al-Bayoumi was being questioned. Records show they passed through at least three more FBI agents over the next two days.

But here the mystery starts. The FBI briefed Met officers to question Bayoumi about the other top-priority exhibits, but the detectives in the custody suite were never given, or briefed on, the plane diagram.

Many FBI agents have told us the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was a nonstop frenzy. But it is difficult to understand how evidence of this importance, in a case being handled with such urgency, was not placed in the hands of the interviewing detectives.

The FBI declined to answer our questions. The Metropolitan Police said it could not comment because of the ongoing legal case.

Shortly after the plane diagram was couriered to Paddington Green, all of Bayoumi’s videos, including the paintball footage, were taken from Birmingham to New Scotland Yard for copying.

By 24 September, the custody suite about a mile away at Paddington Green had access to the video cassettes. Detectives brought the bags of tapes into the room where Bayoumi was being questioned, and some of the footage was played to him.

He was asked about two tapes showing a gathering, but British officers were not briefed by the FBI to ask him about the paintball video — or about his ties to Anwar al-Awlaki.

Bayoumi sitting in his office at a mosque in San Diego, which he founded with money from Saudi donors and support from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs

On the final day before Bayoumi would have to be charged or released, Met detectives joined a conference call with several senior officials from the US Department of Justice and FBI.

Panorama and Radio 4 spoke to two people who took part in the meeting. One recalls the British detectives laying out the evidence they believed met the threshold for the Americans to extradite Bayoumi to face charges in the US.

The DOJ officials replied that no extradition would be sought because there was not enough evidence.

On 28 September 2001, Bayoumi was released.

But by then, the FBI had not sent all of the evidence found in Birmingham back to the US, let alone analysed it thoroughly.

One memorandum from the FBI’s legal attaché in London, sent two weeks later, noted there were a “number of videos, floppy disks and documentation still to be viewed”.

Yet among the files released, the FBI has produced only one document referring to the diagram, despite its evidential importance, and it was created only 11 years after the diagram was first found in 2001.

It was not sent to San Diego, where Bayoumi had lived in the US and where the FBI Field Office was also investigating him.

In fact, San Diego — where agents were interviewing his associates, searching his mosque, and analysing his phone records and bank statements — received almost none of the large volume of evidence seized by the Met Police in Birmingham.

Rick Lambert, who led the FBI’s investigation there, told the BBC his office repeatedly asked New York to send copies of all the evidence. “Their position was, we’re in charge of the case; we’ll send it to you when we’re finished analysing.”

Lambert said New York did not comply with his office’s requests. “I believe there is the potential that had we received that evidence and analysed it, that we would have been able to put the pieces of the puzzle together much more quickly.”

Documents show that in spring 2002, the San Diego office eventually obtained copies of a handful of videos by getting them not from New York, but from the FBI liaison in London.

A copy of the tape was sent to the FBI office in New York, where one agent told us it was viewed. But it was not included in the office’s summaries of Bayoumi’s extremist links.

FBI and DOJ memos from 2002, seen by the BBC, discussed material seized from Bayoumi’s homes in Birmingham that could “demonstrate Omar al-Bayoumi’s anti-American sentiments and beliefs” and writings by Bayoumi himself that “can be interpreted as jihadist”.

But there was no mention of the paintball video or Bayoumi’s link to Anwar al-Awlaki.

Jeffrey Breinholt, then deputy director of counter-terrorism at the Department of Justice and the official overseeing prosecutors handling terrorism charges after 9/11, told the BBC that Bayoumi’s name had come up “as one of the hot possibilities for charges”.

But he said the New York Attorney’s Office never sent charges to him or his colleagues for approval. If it had, the plane diagram would have been important evidence against Bayoumi, he said.

The paintball video, Breinholt told us, is another “very telling bit of evidence” with Anwar al-Awlaki’s presence being “pretty damn significant”.

No charges were brought against Bayoumi.

Agents who tried to investigate Omar al-Bayoumi ran into other obstacles.

In October 2001 in San Diego, Lambert and colleagues wanted to interview several Saudi officials in the US — many linked to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs — whom they suspected had coordinated the help Bayoumi gave to two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Because diplomats have special protected status, the agents needed approval from FBI headquarters and the State Department.

“The answer came back, ‘no, you’re not going to do that,’” Lambert, now a consultant for the 9/11 families in their lawsuit, told us.

Agents in Los Angeles had a similar experience the following year, when they sought permission to interview a Saudi religious diplomat Bayoumi had met immediately after his first encounter with Hazmi and Mihdhar in the city.

“We hit a roadblock so hard, I think we all had airbag burns,” said Steve Moore, who led the FBI’s 9/11 investigation in LA. Moore says his team repeatedly asked to interview the official, but permission never came.

Like the FBI, the State Department declined to comment.

In October 2003, the 9/11 Commission — created by Congress to provide a “full and complete” account of the attacks — interviewed Omar al-Bayoumi in Riyadh. He had returned to Saudi Arabia in the months after his release by British police.

The interview was conducted in the presence of Saudi secret police by the Commission’s executive director Philip Zelikow, a former adviser to President George W Bush, together with a senior staff member and an FBI headquarters agent.

The Commission’s notes from the time show Bayoumi was given an extraordinary level of reassurance during the interview. He “was told that no-one believes he knowingly helped the hijackers carry out their terrorist mission”.

Bayoumi angrily said he was a peace-lover who had become “a victim of the victims”. During the interview, the delegation left for a multi-course dinner hosted by the Mabahith, the secret police, without Bayoumi.

After the interview ended, the Mabahith told the American delegation they “would like to see him cleared”. The Americans replied that no exoneration would be possible before their report was published.

When the 9/11 Commission Report was released in July 2004, Bayoumi was effectively cleared. It described him as “obliging and gregarious” and said there was no evidence he held extremist views.

But some Commission staff were unconvinced of Bayoumi’s innocence and believed it likely he knew Hazmi and Mihdhar were al-Qaeda operatives.

The BBC can reveal that those staff objected to wording in the report saying he was “an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists”.

In the end, a compromise was reached, and that conclusion was attributed to “our investigators who have dealt directly with him and studied his background”.

That line was based on the four and a half hours the Commission delegation spent with Bayoumi, including the dinner break.

The Commission never saw the plane diagram, the paintball video, written evidence of Bayoumi’s alleged extremism, or much of the other material seized by the Met Police.

Philip Zelikow did not answer the specific questions we put to him. He told the BBC the 9/11 Commission’s findings had been reviewed by the government in 2015 and 2021, and that the Commission had been “open about our suspicions and uncertainties. We were careful about whom to accuse of complicity in mass murder.”

The Department of Justice said it could not comment on matters and decisions from 25 years ago involving staff who no longer work there.

Mary Galligan, head of the FBI’s 9/11 investigation, has previously said the Commission had “access to everything”.

We tried to contact Omar al-Bayoumi through the Saudi government, but he did not respond. He has previously denied knowing Hazmi and Mihdhar were hijackers, being a Saudi spy, and having any involvement in 9/11.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia did not respond to our request for comment. It has previously said any claim that Saudi Arabia or its officials were complicit in 9/11 is categorically false.