New video and documents raise questions about Saudi Arabia’s role in the September 11 attacks

A recently released video and other documents have again raised questions about whether a Saudi national who FBI officials believe worked for Saudi intelligence played a role in the September 11 attacks.

Saudi national Omar Al-Bayoumi was the focus of a years-long investigation by the FBI’s San Diego field office because he was linked to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, before the attack.

The video, unsealed in federal court last week, was a self-narrated video showing Al-Bayoumi giving a tour of the sights of Washington, D.C. The video was shot over several days in 1999 and included footage of entrances, exits and security checkpoints at the U.S. Capitol.

Federal officials believe the 9/11 hijackers planned to fly one of the planes, United 93, into the U.S. Capitol before passengers stormed the cockpit and forced the plane to crash in rural Pennsylvania.

Bayomi’s video from Washington was first broadcast by CBS News last week. NBC News and a San Diego-area newspaper reported the video’s existence shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The video was one of the items investigators found in Al-Bayoumi’s apartment in the UK after the September 11 attacks. They also found a notepad with mathematical calculations on how to fly a plane and a video of a party in San Diego where the two hijackers and Al-Bayoumi were present.

The revelations prompted some former police officers and the families of some 9/11 victims to call for further investigations.

“As a former FBI special agent involved in the investigation of the 9/11 attacks (Flight 93), where the majority of the terrorists were Saudi, I have so many questions here,” William Evanina, who headed the National Counterintelligence and Security Center during the Trump administration, posted on X this weekend. “Evidence is evidence. And it took a civil lawsuit to make it public?”

Evanina was referring to a lawsuit filed by families of 9/11 victims after hundreds of pages of FBI documents were declassified and released in 2022. The families’ lawyers filed lawsuits demanding that some of the evidence used to create those FBI reports also be released.

Two FBI reports that were among the recently released documents say Al Bayoumi was believed to be working for Saudi intelligence. “Reliable sources and other members of the San Diego Muslim community believe Al-Bayoumi is working for Saudi intelligence,” one of the documents said.

Another FBI report describes Al-Bayoumi as a paid informant for the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (GIP) who received a monthly salary from the late 1990s until September 11, 2001. Al-Bayoumi is said to live in Saudi Arabia.

A spokesman for the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington said they were reviewing NBC News’ questions about Al-Bayoumi and his ties to Saudi intelligence.

In late September 2001, the British Metropolitan Police raided Al-Bayoumi’s north London apartment and discovered the handwritten document, which contained mathematical calculations on how to fly airplanes. The handwriting specifically refers to airplanes and altitudes.

In a report, FBI agents said they theorized that the document and its associated equations could be used to “calculate the rate of descent when flying an aircraft.”

A pilot consulted by FBI agents in 2012 told them that the equations could be used to fly an airplane. “Given the distance to a target, the altitude at that location, and the current airspeed,” the pilot said, “one could calculate the rate of descent and enter it into the airplane’s computer to initiate a descent to that target.”

The pilot said he doubted someone with limited training could calculate latitude and longitude and then use those calculations to fly a plane to a destination from 35,000 feet. Given the clear weather on Sept. 11 and an altitude of 8,000 to 10,000 feet, one could see about 100 miles and use the waypoints on flight maps and the plane’s autopilot to calculate distance to specific points, the report said.

The pilot apparently told the FBI that “if you manually measure the distance between waypoints on these charts, you can achieve an accuracy of half a nautical mile or less.”

The FBI report concludes: “REDACTED could not imagine any other reason for the equation given the parameters presented in the document than to calculate the rate of descent from a specific altitude.”

The question of whether al-Mihdhar and al-Hamzi received help in San Diego has been unclear for years. Both spoke little English and had no ties to the United States. Al-Bayoumi was seen with them several times, according to the 9/11 Commission report and subsequent FBI reports.