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

The man at the heart of a $1 trillion (£733bn) lawsuit brought by 9/11 families had extensive links to Saudi government officials and went paintballing with one of al-Qaeda's future leaders, video obtained by the BBC reveals.

The footage, which the FBI had within days of the 2001 attacks, stands in stark contrast to Omar al-Bayoumi's 25 years of denials that he was an extremist and a Saudi spy.

Bayoumi, who claimed to be a student when he was in the United States, is seen in one clip embracing Anwar al-Awlaki, who would go on to lead al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In another, Bayoumi and Awlaki are paintballing near San Diego with an official from Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Islamic Affairs.

The videos form part of the 9/11 families' lawsuit against Saudi Arabia and have never been shown publicly before.

The lawsuit argues Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attacks and that Bayoumi aided two of the 19 hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - with another crashing in Pennsylvania.

Bayoumi was arrested in the UK by the Metropolitan Police days after the attacks and the videos were found among his possessions, along with other crucial evidence.

This included a diagram of a plane with a flight descent equation written alongside.

Multiple FBI agents received copies of the diagram, but it was never shared with the British interrogators, even though it had been couriered to the police station where Bayoumi was being held in custody.

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

He and the Saudi government did not respond to the BBC's requests for comment, but both have always denied any involvement in, or prior knowledge of, the attacks. The FBI declined to comment.

After a judge ruled the lawsuit could go ahead in 2018, thousands of documents, as well as videos and photographs, have been released to the court and also declassified through an executive order made by former President Joe Biden.

BBC Panorama and Radio 4 have examined these documents, and spoken to dozens of special agents and investigators, to trace the evidence the FBI gathered about Bayoumi and Saudi Arabia's alleged involvement in 9/11 - and to understand why it was never fully pursued over 25 years.

The plane diagram was sent to the FBI's New York office and was 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 based on the evidence, even though "we've convicted people for less"

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

The San Diego and Los Angeles FBI offices were both blocked 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"

Paintballing to 'train for jihad'

Omar al-Bayoumi arrived in San Diego from Saudi Arabia in 1994. He claimed to be studying English, but court records show that within a few years he had, in effect, abandoned his studies. He was more usually found organising religious events, often with a camcorder pressed to his eye.

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

At one point, some of the men charge into battle, shouting "Allahu Akbar". A visiting Saudi sheikh is with the group and Bayoumi can also be heard addressing Anwar al-Awlaki with the honorific "Sheikh Anwar".

Paintballing emerged as a subject of interest in the FBI's post-9/11 counter-terrorism investigations, and the DOJ used paintball evidence in a number of terrorism prosecutions.

Omar al-Bayoumi and Anwar al-Awlaki were involved 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 of the participants were taking part to train for jihad.

Though Awlaki's extremist preaching would come into sharper focus after 9/11, at the time the paintballing video was recorded he already had connections to al-Qaeda operatives and was shortly to be investigated by the FBI. He was killed in a CIA drone strike in 2011.

Watch on iPlayer now or on BBC One at 20:00 BST on Monday 7 September. You can also listen on BBC Sounds to the Radio 4 podcast Intrigue: A 9/11 Story.

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Saudi Arabia has stated that the paintball video does not reveal who "made" or "took" it. When he was questioned remotely in the 9/11 families' lawsuit in 2021, Bayoumi insisted he had not met Awlaki. The video evidence contradicting his claim was only made available, confidentially, to 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. Further footage records Bayoumi's many meetings with officials and preachers from Riyadh's Ministry of Islamic Affairs. He appears in a video with two ministry officials, one wielding a clipboard, at SeaWorld. Bayoumi passes the camera to his son and bounds into shot to record his presence with them.

The Ministry of Islamic Affairs, created in 1993, was seen as dominated by clerics who espoused a radical view of Sunni Islam and exported it around the world. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide building mosques, and sent dozens of officials to the US, some of whom oversaw a network of preachers with hard-line views.

Plane diagram found in Birmingham

After the 9/11 attacks, Omar al-Bayoumi emerged as an early suspect in the FBI's investigation.

His name had been found 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 blue-lighted down to Paddington Green Police Station in London, where detectives began questioning him. Under UK law at the time, officers could only hold him for seven days without charge.

The following morning, in Birmingham, officers began the meticulous process of logging and bagging up evidence in his properties - a cache 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 starting, several items of documentary evidence - categorised as the highest priority at the direction of the FBI - were taken by police directly to Paddington Green, where the FBI had stationed an agent.

This evidence included a phone book containing 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 had marked: "contains handwritten notes mathematical calculations re height of planes".

Eighteen years later, the FBI would hand the notebook page to the court in the 9/11 families' lawsuit, following a subpoena. The page was made public in 2022.

"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, indicates the height and distance required for a pilot to guide an aeroplane to a given object on the ground. Underneath it is a small drawing of a plane and a series of numbers.

Last year, the federal judge in the families' lawsuit found the notebook page, on the face of it, "connects Bayoumi with knowledge of the 9/11 Attacks".

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

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

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

Many FBI agents have told us the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was a round-the-clock frenzy. But it is hard to understand how a piece of evidence of this importance, in a case being handled with considerable urgency, was not put into the hands of the interviewing detectives.