A video seized by British detectives 23 years ago from an early suspect in the 9/11 attacks raises a series of questions, a survivor of the attacks says.
The previously unreleased footage was taken by the hijackers as they walked around the US government building in Washington DC two years before the attack.
He filmed and commented on the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court and the guards inside, at one point saying in Arabic, “They say our children are devils, but these are devils in the White House.”
“There’s an airport not far from here. A plane is taking off,” he says, with footage of low-flying planes in the background.
The hour-long film ends at the Capitol, with the camera lingering on the two limousines. “Their cars. That’s what the plan said,” a narrator says.
Scotland Yard officers discovered the tape when they arrested the suspect, Omar al-Bayoumi, an adult Saudi Arabian student, at his Birmingham home ten days after 9/11.
He was questioned by counterterrorism investigators for seven days and then released without charge.
The FBI later identified him as a Saudi Arabian spy, but he denied that and any involvement in 9/11, telling US investigators that his films were simply tourist videos.
He admitted a year later to having innocently been friends with two of the future terrorists who hijacked a plane and crashed it into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.
It is unclear whether all or any of the al-Bayoumi tapes and items seized during the raid were turned over to US authorities in 2001.
The video was recently shown in a civil trial in New York in which plaintiffs, victims of the 9/11 attacks and their families, are suing the Saudi Arabian government for complicity in the attacks.
Three years ago, the plaintiffs’ lawyers asked the Metropolitan police to hand over all material from its investigation into Al-Bayoumi, and a team of eight detectives and officers spent several months poring over 104 boxes of stored files.
Plaintiffs’ lawyer Gavin Simpson played the tape and told the judge: “The wealth of evidence seized by the Metropolitan police will enable the judge, the public and the families of the 9/11 victims to understand for themselves how Saudi Arabia supported the 9/11 hijackers.”
“The Bayoumi videotape had all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida terrorist target scout.”
“Al-Bayoumi’s words were extremely damaging,” said Sharon Premori, a 9/11 survivor and activist, after hearing portions of the tape played at a recent hearing.
“The two words he specifically used were, one, ‘demons’ in the Capitol, and two, he mentioned a ‘plan.’ This was not a tourist video, he was previewing the building and the area.”
“It’s fantastic that the Metropolitan police were able to seize this information but it’s a shame we had to wait so long to get it,” said Premoli, who escaped from the 80th floor during the attack on Manhattan’s Twin Towers.
“We don’t know who in the US government had it, or for how long. We know a lot of information got leaked because the FBI and CIA were not cooperating with each other. It’s also possible that the Bush administration had it, but decided not to do anything about it to protect the Saudis.”
The court also showed for the first time notebook pages containing scribbles and calculations about how far the plane was from the ground and the horizon, which Mr Al-Bayoumi’s lawyers suggested were part of his teenage son’s homework.
read more:
Georgia shooting suspect Colt Gray’s father arrested
Hunter Biden’s surprising guilty plea in tax evasion case
Neither the notes nor the tapes were provided to members of the 9/11 Commission, which produced a report on the attacks and their trajectory. The commission criticized the FBI and CIA, but after interviewing Al-Bayoumi in Saudi Arabia, concluded that he had no involvement in the planning.
Robin Swann, co-author of the authoritative book The 11th Day, said: “The evidence submitted by the Metropolitan police provides, from what I have read, significant new evidence which supports the theory that officials of the Saudi Arabian government aided and abetted the 9/11 hijackers, and which is at the heart of the case.”
“Some of my sources have suggested that the FBI was reluctant from the start to look into possible official Saudi involvement, and this was part of the obstructionism they saw in that part of the investigation at the time.”
The Saudi Arabian government has previously denied that it or its officials encouraged or supported the 9/11 terrorists.