A 9/11 Story: 9. The Puzzle

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1:00The 31st of July 2024, a federal courtroom in Manhattan. There's no recording of the hearing, so we've asked some actors to read from the court transcript. All day, senior judge George B. Daniels has been listening to lawyers argue. Lawyers representing the 9-11 families claim Saudi Arabia supported the plot which killed almost 3,000 people in a single morning. The lawyers' representatives are saying Saudi Arabia deny that and want the case thrown out. Thank you. We're going to have to conclude. Thank you again. The lawyer's time is up. But the judge's work continues.

2:03Judge Daniels has the evidence and arguments from both sides. Now he must piece it together and decide whether to dismiss the case or allow it to continue. Retired FBI agent Danny Gonzalez has already reached his conclusion. All the pieces of the puzzle are there. Read the reports and you'll see the big picture. It's not just one thing. Put all these little pieces together and make one big puzzle and you'll see it. Danny and the family's lawyers see a clear picture. Saudi Arabia says they're wrong. What will Judge Daniels see when he puts the pieces together? From Intrigue on BBC Radio 4, this is a 9-11 story. I'm Jane McMullen, Episode 9, The Puzzle. June 1999. Omar Al-Bayumi is filming himself.

3:12Wearing a suit and tie and speaking Arabic, he greets his beloved esteemed brothers. We welcome you from Washington, he says. Over two days he films the white dome of the US Capitol from several angles. He goes inside and out. He captures different exits and security checkpoints, even when he's asked not to. And he notes when most people leave at the end of the day. In the hour long video, he mentions the plan and that he will report in detail. This video is just part of the mountain of evidence Judge Daniels must assess. Danny Gonzalez sees something sinister. In my opinion, it's a casing video, it's not a tourist video. The family's lawyers claim Bayumi is scoping the Capitol building as a potential target,

4:17at a time when Al-Qaeda's leaders are debating where to strike. Saudi Arabia's lawyers pour scorn on that. This isn't terrorism, they say. It's tourism. They note Bayumi also films ducks, the moon, trees, and a remote controlled toy boat. But they acknowledge that he refers to the demons in the US government. The video records more than Washington's landmarks. It captures Bayumi's companions. He drives around the city with two Saudi officials, from the kingdom's ministry of Islamic affairs. When Bayumi turns the camera on one of them, the official covers his face with a map. Bayumi teases him. Even the women here don't cover their faces, he says.

5:21The family's claim that Bayumi is in Washington for these men, to meet and report to their boss at the Saudi Embassy. The two men will later deny to the court even knowing Bayumi. Saudi Arabia says that Bayumi is in Washington to study. His contact with religious officials concerns his volunteer work at a mosque back home in San Diego. Judge Daniels also has some of Bayumi's phone records. They show that Bayumi makes dozens of calls to Saudi officials in the US, including to one of his companions from the car. They form a pattern. The calls are short, often one or two minutes, and often come in quick succession. They're clustered around the time the hijackers arrive in California.

6:24The family's lawyers call it coordination and reporting. Jody Westbrook flowers. This year's number I'm dying when the phone calls during the same time period, 3-9-11 indicates a level of communication that has to help us show that this went all the way to the top. This gets to the core of the family's case. By the top, Jody means the Saudi Embassy and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. This Ministry, the family's claim, cultivates and directs extremism overseas. They alleged that Bayumi and the men on the Washington video, a part of a network of Saudi officials in the US, coordinating to help the hijackers. Saudi Arabia denies that. It says the phone records show calls, not coordination.

7:24No one disputes that Bayumi helped the hijackers. The question for Judge Daniels is why? San Diego 2012. Danny Gonzalez has long recovered from his heart scare and is still with the FBI. He's on the phone with a colleague. They found archive boxes bearing Bayumi's name at an FBI facility near Washington. What do you mean they're going to destroy these boxes or get rid of them? Danny's been investigating Bayumi for more than a decade. But he's never heard of these boxes. Yes, he says. I want them. They said they were going to mail them to me. I said, no, that's unknown. And I said, I'll have somebody pick them up. An agent collects the boxes and takes them to Danny's FBI colleagues in New York.

8:24When they see what's inside, Danny gets another call. Get on a plane, they say, you've got to see this. It's a photo of a yellow notebook page. In blue ink, someone has sketched an airplane, a mathematical formula, and some numbers. To me, it appeared to be an airplane and it had numbers and a diagram and some calculations. So I knew immediately that this was pretty pertinent. British police found the page at Bayumi's house in 2001. FBI personnel in London saw it immediately. In the following months, FBI agents in New York saw it too. But it never reached Danny's investigation in San Diego. Eleven years later, he's seeing it for the first time. We took it to experts. We took it to people who knew pilots. My colleague with the aeronautical engineering degree explained it to me.

9:29And that's all I needed to hear. The experts tell Danny the equation can help pilots estimate their distance to a point on the horizon. To Danny, it potentially links by Ume to the 9-11 plot. I was hoping to take this to the United States Attorney's Office to pursue a prosecution. But no criminal prosecution follows. Danny says nobody told him why. More than seven years later, the same yellow page reaches the 9-11 family's legal team. For lawyer Jodie Westbrook flowers, it's a breakthrough. When we figured out what it was, we knew that it was smoking gun that we've been looking for. The family's commission their own analysis. It concludes that the sketch numbers and equation have a direct relationship to the 9-11 attacks.

10:29One person who might be able to explain the page is the man who drew it. All right, can we turn to the next page please? In 2021, Bayumi has questioned under oath in the lawsuit. Speaking in Arabic via video link from Saudi Arabia, he says the sketch and calculations are in his handwriting. But he can't remember what they were for or why he wrote them. I'm somebody who likes to read, he says. I'm somebody who likes to be exposed to things. Perhaps this is an equation that we studied in high school. And I was trying to remember how to solve it. Saudi Arabia rejects any connection to the 9-11 attacks. And in court, they offer judge Daniels a different explanation. We think the most plausible inference is that he was helping his 14-year-old son with his high school math homework.

11:32Well, he wasn't a high school math student. His son was your honor. But if he didn't testify that, that this belonged to his 14-year-old son, why should we suppose that it does? The plain diagram is just one more piece of the puzzle for judge Daniels. The family's case depends on what happens when he places it with all the other evidence. The wait for a decision extends through the autumn of 2024, past Christmas and into the new year. Spring comes and goes. Eventually, almost 13 months later, a new document appears on the court website. The decision. Terry Strada joined the case 23 years earlier. Now, she opens the ruling with one question.

12:32Did we bring in enough evidence for the judge to rule that they should not be dismissed and the case should go forward? The ruling is 45 pages, but Terry doesn't have to read far. The answer comes at the end of the first paragraph. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's renewed motion to dismiss is denied. She reads on. All of this evidence taken together shows that Bayumi had multiple ties to people working from M.O.I.A. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs. And the Saudi government. And cast out on whether KSA, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. simply sent Bayumi to the U.S. simply to pursue studies. By getting himself involved in the hijackers preparation for a terrorist attack, Bayumi appears to have done much more than what a typical accountant or data processing technician would do.

13:37His involvement appears to bear some connection to his employment by KSA. Terry breathes a sigh of relief. But Judge Daniels has not found Saudi Arabia responsible for 9-11. He has not delivered a final verdict on Bayumi. He has decided that the families are produced enough evidence for their case to proceed. Saudi Arabia says it respectfully disagrees with the decision and intends to appeal. So the legal fight goes on. The question now is how long can Terry go on with it? Christmas 1988. A plane takes off from Heathrow Airport.

14:3738 minutes later, everyone on board is dead. Al-Ibian man Abdul Basa Al-Megrahi is convicted of murdering 270 people. But that's not the end of the story. Almost four decades on, fresh evidence, and a new trial. I'm Miles Bonner. In this podcast, I'm delving into a world of extremist groups, the serious intelligence agents, and global politics. From Radio 4, this is Intrigue, Locker Bay. Lesson First on BBC Signs. My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yowie, a gift shop from the lens of artists and handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely one of the most user-friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future. All of the tools were reading your sales by planning inventory. They were just right there on your dashboard.

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