New videos expose Saudi agent's 9/11 links as FBI evidence buried

Omar al-Bayoumi, the Saudi national at the heart of a $1 trillion (£733bn) lawsuit brought by the families of 9/11 victims, had extensive links to Saudi government officials and went paintballing with a future leader of al-Qaeda, according to video footage obtained by the BBC. The clips, which the FBI possessed within days of the 2001 attacks, contradict Bayoumi's 25 years of denials that he was an extremist or a Saudi spy, and form part of a lawsuit alleging Saudi complicity in the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil.

Bayoumi, who claimed to be a student while in the United States, is seen in one video embracing Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric who would later lead al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula before being killed in a CIA drone strike in 2011. Another clip shows the pair paintballing near San Diego alongside an official from Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Islamic Affairs, a body that spent hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide building mosques and was seen as dominated by clerics espousing a radical form of Sunni Islam. The videos, never shown publicly before, were found among Bayoumi's possessions after his arrest in Birmingham by the Metropolitan Police days after the attacks.

The investigation by BBC Panorama and Radio 4 has traced the evidence the FBI gathered against Bayoumi and sought to understand why it was never fully pursued. Among the most significant exhibits was a yellow lined notebook page containing a sketch of a plane accompanied by a mathematical equation indicating the height and distance required to guide an aircraft to a target on the ground—a document a federal judge last year found "connects Bayoumi with knowledge of the 9/11 Attacks." Multiple FBI agents received copies of the diagram, but it was never shared with British interrogators who questioned Bayoumi at Paddington Green police station, nor with the 9/11 Commission, the independent inquiry into the massacre that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

The plane diagram, which Bayoumi claimed in 2021 he had because he liked finding equations, was couriered to the custody suite where he was being held but was never put into the hands of the interviewing detectives. An FBI source confirmed it was sent to the New York Field Office for analysis, but the BBC has been unable to trace any records of that analysis. Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a lawyer for the 9/11 families, described it as "the smoking gun we'd been looking for." Jeffrey Breinholt, then deputy director of counter-terrorism at the Department of Justice, told the BBC that "we've convicted people for less" than the evidence against Bayoumi, yet no charges were ever brought.

FBI agents in San Diego, where Bayoumi had lived and where he had helped two of the hijackers, repeatedly requested copies of the evidence seized in Birmingham but received almost none of it. Rick Lambert, who ran the San Diego investigation, said his office was blocked by FBI headquarters and the State Department from interviewing Saudi officials connected to Bayoumi. A colleague in Los Angeles described a similar roadblock, saying: "We hit a roadblock so hard, I think we all had airbag burns."

When the 9/11 Commission interviewed Bayoumi in Riyadh in 2003, he was told "no-one believes he knowingly helped the hijackers" and was given a multi-course dinner hosted by Saudi secret police. The Commission's final report in 2004 described him as "obliging and gregarious" and concluded he was "an unlikely candidate" for extremist involvement, a line that some staff objected to and which was based on just four and a half hours of questioning. The Commission never saw the plane diagram, the paintballing video, or much of the other crucial evidence. Saudi Arabia and Bayoumi have consistently denied any involvement in the attacks, and the FBI declined to comment, but the revelations raise profound questions about whether a key figure in the worst terror attack in US history was allowed to slip through the net.