9/11 survivors question discovered video showing ‘Saudi agent’

A video that British investigators seized 23 years ago from one of the first suspects of the September 11 attacks raises a number of questions, says a survivor of the attacks.

The suspect shot the previously unreleased film while wandering around U.S. government buildings in Washington DC two years before the hijackers' attack.

He filmed the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the security guards inside, and provided a running commentary. At one point he said in Arabic: “They say our children are demons. But these are the demons of the White House.”

Referring to footage of a low-flying plane, he says: “Airport not far from here. Plane taking off.”

The hour-long film ends at the Capitol, where the camera lingers on two limousines. A voice-over says, “Your cars. That's what you said in the plan.”

Scotland Yard officers discovered the tape when they arrested the suspect, Omar al-Bayoumi, an elderly Saudi student, at his home in Birmingham ten days after 9/11.

He was interrogated by anti-terrorism investigators for seven days and then released without charge.

He was later identified by the FBI as a Saudi intelligence agent. He denies this and any involvement in 9/11 and has told US investigators that his film was simply a tourist video.

A year later, he innocently admitted to having become friends with two of the future terrorists who had flown a hijacked plane into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.

It is not known whether al-Bayoumi's tape and all or some of the items seized in the raid were turned over to American authorities back in 2001.

The video was recently shown during a civil trial in New York in which the victims of 9/11 and their families – the plaintiffs – are trying to sue the Saudi government for complicity in the attacks.

The plaintiffs' legal team asked the Metropolitan Police three years ago to search through its archives and send everything it had as part of its investigation into Mr al-Bayoumi. A team of eight investigators and staff spent several months combing through 104 boxes of archived files.

The plaintiffs' lawyer, Gavin Simpson, played the tape and told the judge: “A wealth of evidence seized by the Metropolitan Police … enables Your Honour, the public and the families of the victims of 9/11 to see for themselves the mechanism by which Saudi Arabia assisted the 9/11 hijackers.”

“Bayoumi's videotape had all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda scouting out a terrorist target.”

Activist Sharon Premoli, a 9/11 survivor, listened at the recent hearing as parts of the tape were played and said, “Al-Bayoumi's language was very distressing.”

“He used two words in particular, one of which was the 'demons' in the Capitol and the second was 'the plan' that he was referring to. It's not a tourist video, he scouted the buildings and the area.”

Ms Premoli, who escaped from the 80th floor during the attack on the Twin Towers in Manhattan, said: “It is wonderful that the Metropolitan Police were able to secure this information, but it is unfortunate that we have had to wait so long for it.”

“We don't know how long anyone in the U.S. government had the material. We know that the FBI and the CIA didn't help each other, and so a lot of it was missed. It's also possible that the Bush administration had it and decided not to do anything with it to protect the Saudis.”

Also shown in court for the first time was a notebook page containing scribbles and calculations about the distance of a plane from the ground and the horizon. Mr al-Bayoumi's lawyer said the page was part of his teenage son's homework.

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Neither the notebook nor the tape were made available to members of the 9/11 Commission, which wrote a report on the attacks and their background. It criticized the FBI and CIA, but after interviewing al-Bayoumi in Saudi Arabia, concluded that he had no involvement in the conspiracy.

Robbyn Swan, co-author of the definitive book The Eleventh Day, the Full Story of 9/11, said: “The documents presented by the Met are crucial new pieces of evidence which, in my view, actually support the proposition that one or more employees of the Saudi regime assisted the 9/11 hijackers, and that is at the heart of the case.”

“Some of my sources have suggested that the FBI was hesitant to consider the possibility of official Saudi involvement very early on, and that this was a key part of obstructing that part of the investigation that they were monitoring at the time.”

The Saudi government has denied in the past that it or any of its officials encouraged or supported the September 11 terrorists.