A long-running lawsuit and declassified FBI records have renewed scrutiny of Saudi-linked men who helped two future hijackers settle in California.
NEW YORK CITY, NY — More than two decades after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal court fight is testing one of the most disputed questions left from the investigation: whether people working for Saudi Arabia knowingly helped members of the al-Qaida team that would later attack the United States.
The evidence does not establish that Saudi Arabia’s senior leadership ordered, financed or knew about the 9/11 plot. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission said in 2004 that it found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded al-Qaida. But later-declassified FBI material and evidence produced in civil litigation have raised sharper questions about two Saudi-linked men in Southern California and the help they provided to future hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.
The central figures are Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy. Bayoumi was a Saudi civil aviation employee living in San Diego. Thumairy was a religious official at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and an imam associated with the Saudi-funded King Fahd Mosque. Both had contacts that became the subject of extensive FBI investigations after the attacks. Neither man has been convicted of taking part in the 9/11 conspiracy, and Saudi Arabia has denied that its officials knowingly assisted the hijackers.
Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in Los Angeles in January 2000 after attending an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia. On Feb. 1, Bayoumi encountered them at a restaurant in Culver City near the King Fahd Mosque. The 9/11 Commission said it could not determine whether that meeting happened by chance or design. Bayoumi later helped the two men move to San Diego, where they obtained housing and began establishing themselves in the United States. Investigators examined whether others in the local Muslim community also helped them with transportation, language barriers and everyday needs.
The commission initially took a cautious view of Bayoumi. Its investigators described him as an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists and said they had seen no credible evidence that he knowingly aided extremist groups. An FBI assessment from 2004 similarly said investigators had not developed evidence that Bayoumi knew Hazmi and Mihdhar were al-Qaida operatives or that his assistance to them was knowingly connected to terrorism. Those findings became an important part of the public understanding of the Saudi question for years.
Later FBI investigations, declassified records and evidence collected by lawyers for 9/11 families complicated that picture. The materials provided more detail about Bayoumi’s relationship with Saudi institutions and about Thumairy’s contacts in Southern California. The 9/11 Commission had already found that Bayoumi and Thumairy knew each other and that telephone records showed repeated contacts between them. It also described Thumairy as a logical person to investigate as a possible contact for Hazmi and Mihdhar, while saying investigators at the time had found no evidence that he provided assistance to the two men.
The dispute moved into a new phase in August 2025, when U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels denied Saudi Arabia’s renewed attempt to dismiss claims brought by 9/11 victims, relatives, businesses and insurers. The ruling did not find Saudi Arabia liable for the attacks. Instead, Daniels concluded that the plaintiffs had produced enough evidence at the jurisdictional stage for their claims involving Bayoumi and Thumairy to continue toward trial. The court said the record could support an inference that the two men were acting within the scope of Saudi employment when they allegedly assisted the hijackers, an issue Saudi Arabia disputes.
That distinction is crucial. Allowing a lawsuit to proceed is not the same as determining that a government participated in the attacks. The plaintiffs still carry the burden of proving their allegations under the legal standards governing the case. Saudi Arabia can challenge the evidence, the interpretation of the men’s duties and any claim that their actions were directed by the kingdom or undertaken with knowledge of the hijackers’ terrorist purpose.
The broader historical record also cuts against a simple claim that the Saudi state organized 9/11. Osama bin Laden had been stripped of his Saudi citizenship and had openly turned against the kingdom. The 9/11 Commission found that Saudi authorities had pursued some al-Qaida cells before the attacks and that senior Saudi officials had worked with the United States on efforts to pressure the Taliban over bin Laden. At the same time, the commission sharply criticized weaknesses in Saudi oversight of charities and said al-Qaida had found fertile fundraising ground among private donors in the kingdom.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, but nationality alone does not establish government sponsorship. Al-Qaida recruited heavily among Saudis, and commission investigators reported that Saudi nationals made up a large share of recruits in the organization’s Afghan training camps. The more specific issue in the civil case is whether Saudi government employees or agents in the United States knowingly provided assistance that helped Hazmi and Mihdhar become established before the attacks.
The litigation remains unresolved. Daniels granted Saudi Arabia a stay in November 2025 while the kingdom pursued an interlocutory appeal in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. As a result, the competing claims have not produced a final judgment on Saudi responsibility. What has changed since the original 9/11 Commission investigation is the amount of evidence available about the Saudi-linked support network surrounding the first two hijackers to reach Southern California. Whether that evidence ultimately proves legal responsibility by Saudi Arabia remains for the courts to decide.
Author note: Last updated September 7, 2026.