By Dan Christensen and Robbyn Swan, FloridaBulldog.org
The strange case of 9/11 is getting stranger due to inaction by the FBI and Department of Justice.
Within days of the September 11, 2001 attacks, agents in the FBI’s San Diego field office were hot on the trail of possible co-conspirators of al Qaeda’s 19 suicide hijackers. At their request, counterterrorism officers at New Scotland Yard in the United Kingdom had picked up and were interviewing one suspected accomplice, Omar al Bayoumi. Bayoumi was a shadowy Saudi then suspected of having provided substantial assistance to the first two hijackers to enter the U.S.
The San Diego agents and their UK counterparts, however, were kept in the dark about critical evidence seized at Bayoumi’s residence in Birmingham, England.
The evidence: a video, narrated by Bayoumi, about his 1999 visit to Washington where he took apparent surveillance footage of the U.S. Capitol – including its security features; and a yellow-lined notepad with a crude sketch of an airplane and various calculations, including an equation pilots use to calculate a plane’s rate of descent to the horizon.
The 9/11 Commission was never made aware of that evidence. Its final report assessed Bayoumi to be an “unlikely candidate” for involvement in the attacks after concluding there was “no credible evidence” that he knowingly aided the two 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar.
Florida Bulldog first reported the existence of Bayoumi’s video in February 2024; “60 Minutes” first broadcast it later that year. The CBS News program followed up last month with an interview of former San Diego FBI agent Daniel Gonzalez, who said he only learned of Bayoumi’s incriminating notepad in 2012 … almost by accident. He said, too, that he was unaware of Bayoumi’s video of the Capitol until London’s Metropolitan Police Service recently produced it to lawyers representing the 9/11 Families in their New York civil lawsuit against Saudi Arabia.
Gonzalez declined to be interviewed by Florida Bulldog.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 jetliner attacks that leveled the twin 110-story towers of New York’s World Trade Center and heavily-damaged the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C. Thousands more were injured.
Last weekend, The Sunday Times of London added a new dimension to events. The newspaper spoke with retired Detective Constable David Campbell, one of the officers identified in court papers filed in New York as having interviewed Bayoumi at London’s Paddington Green station at the U.S.’s request from Sept. 21-28, 2001.
According to The Times, however, the British officers “were never given [the] potentially damning document and video linking him to the attacks” that could have been used while questioning Bayoumi.
Detective Campbell told The Times that while Bayoumi steadfastly denied any involvement in 9/11 “the case stank to high heaven. There were too many coincidences.” He had hoped to be able to hand over Bayoumi to U.S. law enforcement.
“I tried my very, very best to convince the U.S. Justice Department that they needed to extradite him,” Campbell said.
‘I’M STILL SHOCKED TO THIS DAY’
In another stunning disclosure, Campbell explained that following a lengthy conference call with U.S. Justice Department authorities during which he and a fellow detective told them what Bayoumi had said, as well as their substantial suspicions about him, an unnamed Justice Department official nixed the idea of returning Bayoumi to the U.S. as either a suspect or a material witness.
“He said there was insufficient evidence to justify extradition,” Campbell recalled, according to The Times. “I was gobsmacked … That was a pretty devastating result. Jaw dropping.
The U.S. decision not to extradite Bayoumi is also something that continues to shock Ken Williams. Williams, a longtime FBIcounterterrorism agent, wrote a prescient memo in the summer of 2001 suggesting a rise in Arab students attending U.S. flight schools might be linked to terrorism.
In an email, Williams told the Bulldog that the U.S. decision not to extradite Bayoumi was “the million-dollar question”. The “video of the U.S. Capitol and the content of Bayoumi’s language in the video where he makes references to a “plan” and the drawing of the plane with the Pythagoreum Theorem should have been a huge red flag for the FBI…”
Williams dismisses the notion that his bureau colleagues were simply sloppy. Instead he believes – while stressing that it’s only his opinion – that the bureau might have been told to ” stand down” by senior U.S. government officials in order to preserve relations with Saudi Arabia or to protect a joint intelligence operation to penetrate al Qaeda in which Bayoumi may have played a role. Neither circumstance, Williams stresses, mitigates Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for aiding the attacks.
“I still think about it,” Campbell said, “and I’m still shocked to this day.”
“We were going through procedures with Bayoumi purely because of what the FBI had sent us. You know, if they ask us to investigate, I will do my best to try and present the evidence as best as I possibly can and as thoroughly as I’m able,” Campbell told The Times.
“But the more I was speaking with Bayoumi, the more I thought ‘yes, there is a lot coming out and he needs to go before a court to answer it.’ ”
Bayoumi was instead released. He returned to his home where he continued his studies at Aston University, obtaining a master’s degree in management research.
The Times reported that all the original evidence seized from Bayoumi’s residence was returned to him, including the videos and the telltale notepad. But seven copies of all the evidence were made with one sent to the FBI via the legal attaché at the U.S. embassy in London.
The newspaper said Bayoumi departed the UK for Saudi Arabia for the final time on August 2022, “taking all the original evidence with him.”
Like Campbell, ex-FBI agent Gonzalez told “60 Minutes’’ he was “angry” that he and his fellow San Diego agents weren’t made aware of Bayoumi’s video of the Capitol or his yellow notepad with the remarkable computations. They’d been investigating him since Day One.
A 9/11 Commission document obtained by the Bulldog makes clear that three FBI field agents – two from San Diego and one from New York – flew to London for Bayoumi’s questioning. Those agents names are redacted from the document and they have not been identified. The sequence of events described by Gonzalez and Campbell begs the questions: what did those agents see of the incriminating evidence and what role if any did they play in the failure to pass it on.
And there was another good reason. The same day Bayoumi’s home was raided 5,500 miles away, agents in San Diego stopped a car driven by Mohdar Abdullah in the parking lot of a San Diego electronics store.
Abdullah, a Yemeni college student who FBI reports say was tasked by Bayoumi with helping hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar, was charged with overstaying his visa and later deported. In between he was flown to New York to testify before a grand jury on a material witness warrant. Most recently he lived in Sweden.
In his subcompact Metro Geo, agents found “a spiral notebook displaying handwriting containing the word ‘hijacking,’ and references to planes falling from the sky and mass killing,” according to a Sept. 22, 2001 affidavit by Gonzalez.
DID FBI HIGHER UPS WITHHOLD KEY EVIDENCE?
Both Bayoumi and Abdullah, the man he had reportedly assigned to assist the hijackers, would provide unconvincing explanations for possessing material indicating foreknowledge of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Bayoumi later called it “just an equation.” Abdullah told agents the spiral notebook belonged to a teenaged friend.
The failures that kept FBI agent Gonzalez and his fellow San Diego agents, as well as the British officers uninformed about Bayoumi’s incriminating notepad and his disturbing video are not only shocking, but significant.
And they give rise to an unsettling question. Were the notepad and video lost for years due to some egregious bureaucratic error, or were they deliberately withheld by higher ups at the FBI and/or Justice Department? If it was deliberate, why?
The answer isn’t likely to be found in the United Kingdom. According to The Times, which said it conducted a substantial investigation, the notepad “was immediately bagged and marked as ‘category I’ – of critical importance – with a note explaining its significance. Labeled as exhibit PSS/34, it was passed on to the FBI as a matter of urgency,” the newspaper wrote.
The Capitol video, labeled “Washington trip June 23, 1999-July 4” and among approximately 80 videos seized at Bayoumi’s residence, was similarly “bagged and labeled” (to preserve the chain of custody for later use in court) “and immediately handed to FBI liaison officers based in London for analysis,” according to The Times.
“The analysts reported their findings to a senior FBI agent, who then fed what was deemed relevant information into the ‘tunnel’ – a direct channel back to the British officers – with no analysis or further investigation by the Met [MPS].”
The United Kingdom does not allow the FBI the authority to interview, search or arrest suspects on British soil. So the job fell to the Metropolitan Police Service’s elite counterterrorism unit.
Florida Bulldog examined hours of the MPS’s interviews of Bayoumi, who was represented by counsel, solicitor Jacqui Gordon-Lawrence. He’d been arrested at 6:15 p.m. Sept. 21, 2001.
Before the interviews, Bayoumi was examined by a doctor “who says he’s ok to talk.” Bayoumi then agreed to be interviewed, had “a cup of tea” and was “read his rights.”
Det. Campbell explained he’d been arrested “for the preparation, instigation and commission of acts of terrorism in the United States,” a violation of the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000.
“Do you understand the reason why you’ve been arrested?”
“Exactly,” Bayoumi, then 43, replied in English.
BAYOUMI’S COOLNESS
Bayoumi went on to offer that he’d been in the U.S. previously to study, came to the UK on May 10, 2000, was a student at Aston University, married in 1985, had four children and moved to his then address just three days before. “We live a normal life,” he said.
“I work in [Saudi] civil aviation finance. I got loaned to a private company and they support me to finish my education. In 1993 I was in Boca Raton to study English,” he added.
The detectives asked Bayoumi about CDs he owned, including a flight simulator. Bayoumi said he bought it to try it out but it didn’t work.
Det. Campbell would later say he was struck by Bayoumi’s coolness while answering nerve wracking questions on the first night of questioning: “We’re investigating the most serious terrorist incident in the world. A large number of people have been killed and we, the police in London, want to take our part in bringing the people involved to justice. Do you know anything about the people who have committed this act of terrorism?’’
“No,” said Bayoumi, adding he’d read “some magazines” about 9/11 but was too busy to pay much attention. He also told the detectives that “our faith,” Islam, rejects killing people.
The next day the questioning got tougher. And it’s clear that by then the FBI had provided the interrogators with certain information about Bayoumi’s life in San Diego, and his significant involvement with Hazmi and Mihdhar.
Again and again, the detectives asked Bayoumi about his interactions with the two future hijackers. They didn’t tell Bayoumi their names, apparently wanting to see if he’d blurt them out since, among other things, Bayoumi had acted as their financial guarantor when they were seeking to rent an apartment in San Diego – something Bayoumi kept saying he didn’t recall doing, then said maybe he did.
Bayoumi’s flip-flopping frustrated the detectives.
Campbell: You’re a very intelligent man…You’re a Master’s of Business Science?
Bayoumi: Yeah.
Campbell: You’ve got other professional qualifications?
Bayoumi: Uh-huh.
Campbell: I find it very difficult to believe that you do not remember the names of the people that you would have stood for, guarantor for something which is financially binding. Because you’re a man of finance; Isn’t that correct?
Bayoumi: Yeah.
At one point, Bayoumi was asked about a check he wrote that paid for Hazmi and Mihdhar’s initial accommodations. He said he wrote it as a favor because the landlord wouldn’t accept cash. He said the two Saudi men he was helping, who he still had not named, repaid him in cash.
Eventually, Bayoumi recalled both the guarantee he signed and, in a truncated way, the names of both Hazmi and Mihdhar. He also told how he’d chanced to meet them at a Los Angeles restaurant, gave them his phone number in San Diego, and that the pair later showed up at the mosque he attended there asking for help finding a place to live.
One of the British officers remarked that Bayoumi’s answers suggested “he doesn’t want to recall the things linking him” to Hazmi and Mihdhar.
A 9/11 ENDURING MYSTERY
The detectives were also unsatisfied with Bayoumi’s answers about more than $32,000 that had gone through his bank account since February 1999. They were suspicious because two of the sums he deposited were just a few dollars short of the $10,000 reporting threshold.
Bayoumi was also asked about one of 9/11’s enduring mysteries.
Hazmi and Mihdhar, who spoke no English, arrived at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on Jan. 15, 2000, days after attending what authorities have said was a high-level gathering of al Qaeda leaders in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
But the two men immediately seemed to vanish for the next two weeks. Neither the 9/11 Commission, nor apparently the FBI or CIA, could pick up their trail until Feb. 1 when they encountered Bayoumi and his friend, Caysan Bin Don, at the Los Angeles halal restaurant a few blocks away from the King Fahd Mosque.
During his questioning by the MPS in England, Bayoumi was asked if he had traveled from San Diego to Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000. He replied that he might have gone to the Saudi consulate or the King Fahd Mosque, but not LAX. He also answered no when asked if he knew the two men had arrived at the airport and gave another no when asked if he’d told anyone about their arrival.
The English police pointed out that this was one of the few occasions during the interviews when Bayoumi answered yes or no, and that there had been “lots of maybes.”
Det. Campbell further told Bayoumi, “We know the time they arrived in the country, and ten minutes later you got two calls on your phone. Wasn’t this someone telling you they were in the country?”
“No,” Bayoumi replied. “I am an honest man.”
Finally, the police asked Bayoumi if he’d be willing to travel to the U.S. as a witness to make a statement. Before Bayoumi could answer, his solicitor told him not to answer until they had consulted.
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