Saudi official support for the September 11 hijackers
Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. Two men connected to the Saudi state met the first two to arrive and helped them settle in San Diego. Whether that was hospitality or tasking has never been established.
Why this verdict
Unresolved on a narrow question: whether Saudi officials knowingly assisted the first two hijackers. The 9/11 Commission found no evidence the Saudi government as an institution or its senior officials funded al-Qaeda; the FBI's own later assessments, released from 2016 onward, describe Omar al-Bayoumi as a Saudi intelligence asset and put the odds of his advance knowledge at even. Those are two credible bodies reading the same file differently, and the litigation that would settle it is still running.
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01The claim
That officials of the Saudi government knowingly provided support to the September 11 hijackers — specifically that Fahad al-Thumairy, a consular employee and imam at the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, and Omar al-Bayoumi, later described by the FBI as a Saudi intelligence asset, were directed to assist Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar after their arrival in California in January 2000, and that this was concealed by both governments.
02Where it came from
The concentration of Saudi nationals among the hijackers raised the question immediately. It acquired substance from the joint congressional inquiry of 2002, twenty-eight pages of which were classified for fourteen years and became a political object in their own right. The pages, released in redacted form in July 2016, set out the San Diego contacts. 'File 17', a companion document, listed dozens of names and links the 9/11 Commission had not pursued to the end. Separately the FBI ran an investigation, Operation Encore, whose files began to emerge from 2021 under an executive order on declassification.
03What the record shows
? UNRESOLVED — A real open question. Credible sources disagree.
What is documented is not in serious dispute. Al-Bayoumi met Hazmi and Mihdhar in Los Angeles, helped them find an apartment in San Diego, paid the first months' rent and helped them open bank accounts. He was in frequent telephone contact with the Saudi consulate, the embassy in Washington and the Islamic affairs office during that period, and with al-Thumairy. He drew a salary routed through a Saudi government contractor while doing no discernible work for it. Prince Bandar's wife made regular payments to the family of Osama Bassnan, al-Bayoumi's friend and neighbour, some of which moved on to al-Bayoumi's wife.
The disagreement is about what that means, and it is a disagreement between named and serious parties.
The 9/11 Commission, having seen the classified material, wrote that it found no evidence the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded al-Qaeda. Its staff have defended that finding since.
Against it: the FBI stated in 2021 that al-Bayoumi was working for the General Intelligence Presidency, and in 2022 an internal assessment put the chance that he had advance knowledge of the attacks at roughly even. A video al-Bayoumi filmed of the Capitol, recovered by British police in 2001 and released in the 9/11 families' litigation in 2021, is read by the plaintiffs' experts as casing and by the Saudi government as tourism.
Saudi Arabia denies throughout that al-Bayoumi was an agent or that any official assisted the hijackers. The lawsuit brought under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, allowed to proceed in 2018, is the forum in which this will be resolved or not; it has not been.
This entry is scoped deliberately. It is not a claim that Saudi Arabia planned the attacks, for which there is no evidence at all. It is the narrower question of knowing assistance by officials, on which the American government's own agencies have on the record disagreed with each other.
04What it cost
The classified pages did more damage than their contents warranted: fourteen years of secrecy created the impression of a cover-up whose scale the eventual release did not match, and the release itself convinced nobody, because a redacted document is read by each side as confirming its own position. Congress passed JASTA over a presidential veto in 2016, stripping the sovereign immunity that had blocked the families' suit. The case continues.
05Connections
06Sources
Government · 2004
The 9/11 Commission Report
Journalism · 2023
The Focus of the 9/11 Families' Lawsuit Against Saudi Arabia
Journalism · 2016
Release of 9/11 report could strain US relations with Saudi Arabia
Journalism · 2018
Saudi Arabia must face U.S. lawsuits over Sept. 11 attacks
Encyclopedia
Alleged Saudi role in the September 11 attacks