Was Saudi Arabia involved in 9/11?

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1:16Back in the early 2000s, before smartphones, if you wanted to record something, a family holiday, a concert, a graduation, a party, you had to use a camcorder. So, we're in San Diego.

1:34Jane McMullen:It's mid-February 2000. We're in the suburbs and there's a kind of squat apartment complex called Parkwood Apartments.

1:47Jane McMullen:And in one of the apartments, a one-bed flat, there is a party happening. This is Jane McMullen. She's a reporter with the BBC and she's describing a home video that would later become evidence in an FBI investigation. It's not like a normal party. It's a party where the door is locked and inside there's no furniture. Everyone's sat on the floor around the edge of the room, apart from a few individuals who are moving around serving food. They've got a whole roast lamb, which they're serving. Jane's been investigating what happened in this San Diego apartment block in the months that led up to the 9-11 attacks, and in particular, some of the people that lived there.

2:43Jane McMullen:The guests at this party are local people from the community, and then there are three individuals. Two of them don't speak English, they're very smartly dressed, and they are helping to serve, they're kind of playing a hosting role. together with one guy who's wearing a white cricket jumper and is very kind of like, is laughing and joking with everyone, is very much the centre of the tension. He's kind of like the compere of the gathering. What Jane's found out about these three men, particularly the one in the cricket jumper, gets to the heart of one of the most sensitive questions about 9-11.

3:19And the accusations, always denied, that have dogged one of the United States' closest allies for 25 years.

3:27Jane McMullen:The links between the three of them may tell us something that is not widely known about the 9-11 attacks and about the allegations that Saudi Arabia may have been involved in the attacks.

3:44From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman. Today on The Global Story, an exclusive BBC investigation. Was Saudi Arabia involved?

4:02Jane, you've been digging into this party and some of the events that happened around this time in the lead up to 9-11. And one of the central characters that you've met in your investigation is a woman called Holly. Who is she and why is she important to your investigation? What's her story?

4:20Jane McMullen:so holly ratchford was the manager of the parkwood apartment complex in the suburbs of san diego she was in her 20s at the time she has never spoken to the media she'd had a slightly kind of untethered life she'd moved around a lot in her teens and her early 20s and had um got married and got and had kids and got divorced all quite young and she really landed on her feet when she got this job managing this apartment complex and she was so good that like there was always people moving in they never had any vacancies for long you know she always had really good turnover in these apartments but she also just had like a wild sense of fun i was really good at my paperwork but that wasn't what made the job worth doing for me for me it was the interactions with the people.

5:10It sounds like it was a real family for you.

5:12Jane McMullen:Oh yeah, oh yeah. You know, she would decorate her office and have pool parties all the time and, you know, have, trying to get everybody together and everybody to really make it feel like it was a family living there in this apartment complex. And we would have a blast. And I always told my staff, when someone comes in here, this is their home. You make them feel like this is their home and they'll stay. She's a very ordinary person, a lovely ordinary person who ends up playing quite a central role as a witness to a very important moment in this story because at the beginning of February 2000, two men come into her office.

5:56I thought they were kind of nice, young looking men. I want to believe everybody's a good guy.

6:05I don't think I ever want to be as blindsided as I was by them not being who they said they were.

6:13Jane McMullen:These two guys, they're from the Middle East. They're Saudis. They don't speak any English. But then there are a lot of people in Parkwood that don't speak English. So that's not that unusual in itself. They want to get an apartment. So they've come in with a guy. There's a guy who's actually a resident already at Parkwood, who is helping them to get this apartment, translating for them, and also just organising all the arrangements for them. Essentially, he's their chaperone. He's managing everything for them because they're kind of a bit out of their depth. They didn't speak to me professionally on a one-to-one basis.

6:45They only spoke to me high, you know, the pleasantries. The problem is they've got no income. They didn't meet the income criteria at all. They didn't have bank accounts. They had none of that. What are they actually doing in San Diego?

6:59Jane McMullen:They've literally just arrived in San Diego at this point. They arrived the day before. It turns out they've actually never been to America before. They don't know about American culture. So their story is they're there to learn English. And so Holly has this decision. Is she going to rent an apartment to them? But she can't because they don't have any of the things that she needs. So it's a quick no from Holly. And so the friend takes them to the bank, helps them get a bank account. And then he brings them back to her office on the third day and he agrees to co-sign their lease. And who is this third man, this benefactor?

7:36Jane McMullen:So the third man is the guy at the centre of the investigation that I've been doing. He's a guy called Omar al-Bayoumi. He's a Saudi national. He's in his early 40s and he says he's a student. Now, when he arrived in San Diego in 1994, he was studying. He studied English and and then he's enrolled in business courses. So he's a student, and he's, in Holly's view, he's a family guy. He's a guy who hangs out by the pool with his kids and takes them on outings, and we've actually got some of his home movies that he's shot. Nice one. Smile, girl, smile. Where, you know, we see him at SeaWorld with his kids on Independence Day looking at the dolphins.

8:23Jane McMullen:batting around a ball with his family by the parkwood pool he's traveling and visiting places in america he's learning english making a life for himself right and that's what holly thinks and holly makes friends with the guy she thinks that he's just one of the you know just like everybody else at parkwoods she describes him as bubbly and social he's very much a kind of like fixture of the parkwood social scene well so far so wholesome what have you found out about what al-Bayoumi was actually in San Diego to do. So 25 years later, al-Bayoumi is at the center of a $1 trillion lawsuit that the 9-11 families are brought against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

9:03Jane McMullen:And the allegation against him is that he facilitated the 9-11 hijackings because he provided material support to the first two hijackers to arrive in the US in February 2000, when he brought the hijackers in to Holly's rental office. It's clear that without his support, they wouldn't have been able to find a place to live. They couldn't have done that by themselves. Did Holly think there was anything unusual about his support of these two individuals at the time or just took it as read? No, he told her that they were just two friends from the mosque. They were staying with him and he just needed to find them somewhere to live.

9:41Well, this is all in the kind of 18 months leading up to the 9-11 attacks in 2001. So what happens next?

9:50Jane McMullen:Well, what happens next for Holly is they move out after about four months. They move somewhere else in San Diego and she doesn't really think anything more of it. And then, you know, fast forward 16 months, she gets a phone call out of the blue from somebody who she thinks is in property management asking for reference for these two men. I was like, oh, yeah, they're really nice. Everything is fine. Their file's fine. Because I knew it off the top of my head. And then she realizes that the woman isn't in property management. She's a reporter. And the woman says, Did you know that they were two of the terrorists that flew their planes in the Pentagon?

10:27And I went, what? I had no idea. No idea. I mean, I almost just cried.

10:36Jane McMullen:It wasn't very long after that that the FBI came knocking at her door. And they wanted to go through the rental agreement. They wanted to find out everything they could about the two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmin, Khalid al-Midah. I had all my documents right there. I was able to pull those files and we were able to sit there and go through them and look exactly what happened. And what they found in the files was not only all this information about the two hijackers, but this third man. Where is Bayoumi at this point? Is he still living in the apartment block? Bayoumi at this point has moved to the UK and when the FBI started to look into him, they wrote to the British police and within 10 days of 9-11, Bayoumi was arrested and taken down to London where he's questioned.

11:26This interview is being shared with you.

11:28Jane McMullen:It's actually a really extraordinary interview. We're investigating the most serious terrorist incident in the world. He explains that he's a student, he doesn't know anything about 9-11, and he doesn't know any of the perpetrators of 9-11. I don't have any idea about this situation. The two detectives, the Met detectives that are questioning him, know that's not true. What evidence do they present him with to the contrary? Well, that's a really good question, because they are never given very much evidence... By the Americans? ...by the FBI. And so one thing that you would expect them to be given is the rental agreement, which tells you, for instance, how much rent the hijackers were paying, how much Bayoumi was on the hook for if the hijackers didn't pay, and the terms of that guarantor agreement that Bayoumi signs, which are actually really strict.

12:23Jane McMullen:But they never get any of that information. So the investigators in the UK are flying partly blind. Right. And so they question him, but he says that he helps people out in terms of getting them apartments all the time.

12:39Jane McMullen:And the detectives say, give us the names of some people that you've got apartments for. And you can't give any names.

12:57It's financially binding.

13:01Jane McMullen:It goes round and round and round. And eventually, he gives these two names. I remember now the guy, they came together, two. Two of them, right? Yeah. The first one, Nawaf, I think. And the second? The second one? I think Khaled. Nawaf and Khaled, the two names of the two hijackers, right? But he's gone from saying that he does this for all sorts of people to eventually saying he's only ever done it for these two people. But Bayoumi's story that comes out through this interview is that he just met them a couple of days before. He'd gone to Los Angeles, which is 120 miles from San Diego. I went to Los Angeles first to renew my passport.

13:48I was in the consulate over there.

13:51Jane McMullen:After he'd gone to the consulate, he'd gone and had a meal in a restaurant just around the corner from the mosque. And there he'd heard these two guys talking in Gulf Arabic. And he gets chatting to them. We're from, they said, we are from Saudi Arabia. He says that these two guys tell him they don't like L.A. and they want to learn English. And he says... If you need help or something like that, just call me. And he gives them his phone number. And the next day, they show up in his mosque in San Diego. And that's when he gets them the apartment. How does that story that he is giving to the British police map onto the story that Holly has from San Diego?

14:32Jane McMullen:What Holly says is that in the weeks before the hijackers arrived, that Bayoumi had come in asking for an apartment for two people. That would suggest that he knew that there were people that were coming. Now, another thing that Bayoumi says in the interview with the police is that it was a very brief encounter with the hijackers, that after he got them their apartment, he left town, he didn't really like them, he didn't want to socialise with them, he basically didn't have very much contact with them after that one act of support. What Holly told me was that she saw them together. They were friends.

15:13Jane McMullen:They were at his house. They did stuff together. and so it really cast doubt on this narrative that Bayoumi portrays that you know that there wasn't a sort of ongoing relationship with them. So we have these two individuals we have them it would appear according to Holly with strong links to this guy Bayoumi. What have you found out in your investigations about who Bayoumi actually was? Right so remember Bayoumi claims he's a student, the FBI investigated Bayoumi extensively after 9-11, and they discovered that he doesn't go to class. And instead, he's hanging out a lot in the Muslim community, organizing events.

15:52Jane McMullen:He runs a mosque, and he is often seen with a camcorder pressed to his eye, filming events and asking questions of people. And it leads many people in the Muslim community to tell the FBI that they think he's some kind of Saudi intelligence officer. Doing what? Essentially reporting on the community, on dissidents, to the Saudi government. So this is something that a lot of Saudi communities have. They'll have somebody that is essentially monitoring, checking for dissident behavior. They're very worried about these communities around the world. What we have also discovered is that he has a steady stream of officials from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs visiting him in San Diego, and they come over at key moments, and he films them as well.

16:42Jane McMullen:And he also has contacts with a number of known extremists, including a guy called Anwar al-Awlaki, who goes on to lead al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And Awlaki at this point already had extremist connections, connections to al-Qaeda associates, and Bayoumi is very friendly with him, and we can see that in video evidence that he's incredibly friendly with Awlaki. And so there's a sort of sense that Bayoumi, he's someone who's very well plugged into the Saudi government network. And he's someone who's got extremist contacts as well. The bombshell allegation there is that he may have been linked to the Saudi government.

17:22How strong are those connections? What have you been able to establish? Is he actually receiving any kind of official government salary or anything like that?

17:31Jane McMullen:He was. He was seconded from a part of the Ministry of Defence to study English in San Diego. And while he was studying English, he was being paid by two companies that were linked to the Ministry of Defence. He was being paid an extraordinary amount of money for a student,$90 ,000 a year. And the FBI, actually, after 9-11, they spoke to somebody that worked at one of these companies. And this guy described him as a ghost employee because he never showed up. The FBI also raided his mosque and found an address book, which they described to us in the program as a rolodex of contacts with Saudi government officials.