A federal judge in New York has cleared the way for families of 9/11 victims to continue their lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, rejecting the kingdom's latest push to dismiss the case, CBS News reports. The suit alleges Saudi officials may have aided the hijackers, a claim the Saudi government fiercely disputes.
The legal battle, which has been described as a "labyrinth," has persisted for years, with Saudi Arabia previously seeing the case tossed in 2015 before it was revived by a federal appeals court. In 2016, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, expanding US courts' authority to handle such claims. This law became pivotal in allowing the case to move forward.
At the heart of the allegations: whether two hijackers—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who later crashed a plane into the Pentagon—received help from Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national said to have met al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi by chance at a restaurant before helping them find a place to live in Los Angeles, where they'd recently settled. Plaintiffs, however, point to recently declassified federal reports suggesting Bayoumi had "extensive ties" to the Saudi government and acted as an intelligence officer.
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Evidence cited includes a notepad in Bayoumi's home with a plane sketch and a mathematical equation possibly useful for figuring the rate of descent to a target, as well as video footage of him filming entrances at the US Capitol while referencing a "plan." The Capitol is believed to have been the intended target of Flight 93, on which passengers were able to overcome the hijackers and the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field instead. The lawsuit also claims another Saudi national, diplomat Fahad al-Thumairy, worked closely with Bayoumi and the hijackers, CNN reports.