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The FBI has released the first batch of certain documents related to its investigation of the 9/11 attacks which fortified suspicions of official Saudi involvement with the hijackers of the planes.
The families of the attacks’ victims have for years pushed the US government to declassify and make public more information about 9/11, which was a series of strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage in the United States.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists, 15 of them Saudi nationals, but many experts and independent researchers have raised questions about the official account.
The latest release by the FBI comes after US President Joe Biden last week directed the Justice Department and other agencies to review and release the documents.
Among the documents released, a memo from April 4, 2016, which had been classified until now, showed links between Omar Bayoumi, at the time a student but suspected to have been a Saudi intelligence operative, and two of the al-Qaeda operatives who participated in the plot to hijack and crash four airliners into targets in New York and Washington.
In 2009 and 2015, a series of interviews were carried out with a source whose identity is classified. Citing the interviews, the document provides details about contacts and meetings between Bayoumi and the two hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Midhar, after the two arrived in Southern California in 2000 ahead of the attacks.
The document also strengthens already-reported links between the two and an official at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles as well as Fahad al Thumairy, an imam at the King Faad mosque.
According to the document, telephone numbers associated with the source showed contact with a number of people who helped Hamzi and Midhar while they were in California, including Bayoumi, as well as the source himself.
Bayoumi, beyond his official identity as a student, had “very high status” in the Saudi consulate, the source told the FBI, according to the document.
