A U.S. federal judge George Daniels has cleared the path for families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia over allegations that its officials secretly aided the hijackers behind the 2001 terror attacks.
For years, attorneys representing Saudi Arabia have fought to dismiss the case, first filed in 2003, insisting that the Kingdom, as a sovereign state, is shielded from civil litigation in American courts.
“KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] did not proffer sufficient evidence to the contrary,” Daniels was quoted as saying by ABC News.
Daniels added: “Although KSA attempts to offer seemingly innocent explanations or context, they are either self-contradictory or not strong enough to overcome the inference that KSA had employed Bayoumi and Thumairy to assist the hijackers.”
According to the judge’s opinion, there is evidence that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent Bayoumi to San Diego in 1994. The official reason was to pursue education. Plaintiffs contended he was co-opted by Saudi intelligence, which Bayoumi denied.
The Saudis assigned Thumairy to serve as imam of a mosque in Los Angeles in 1998. One of his bank accounts received a significant amount of funds from a senior member of the Saudi cabinet, the judge wrote in his decision.
Thumairy said the money was for mosque expenses.
When al-Qaeda sent two of the hijackers — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar — to Los Angeles in January 2000, they were brought to the mosque and introduced to Thumairy, who left the U.S. five weeks prior to the attacks.
About a month after meeting Thumairy, the two hijackers met Bayoumi, who assisted them in finding an apartment in San Diego.
On a notepad seized from Bayoumi, authorities said they saw a handwritten sketch of an airplane along with some numbers, calculations, and notes.
Plaintiffs alleged that the Saudi government engaged Thumairy and Bayoumi to carry out covert activities in the U.S. that provided material support and assistance to the hijackers.
The September 11, 2001, attacks remain the deadliest act of terrorism in human history, claiming 2,996 lives in a single day.
Among the dead were 2,977 innocent victims and 19 hijackers who carried out the suicide missions. Thousands more were injured, and many continue to suffer long-term health complications decades later.
New York City bore the heaviest loss. When two hijacked planes struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, nearly 1,700 people perished in the North Tower and about 1,000 in the South Tower as the buildings collapsed.
At the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, another 125 people were killed when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the military headquarters.
The rest of the fatalities came from the four hijacked flights: 92 passengers and crew on American Airlines Flight 11, 65 on United Airlines Flight 175, 64 on American Airlines Flight 77, and 44 on United Airlines Flight 93, the last of which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers bravely fought back against the hijackers.
The destruction of the World Trade Center’s North Tower alone made 9/11 the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history — a day that changed the world forever.