Landlady to 9/11 hijackers reveals their links to alleged Saudi spy
BBC News · C · trust 32/100
Holly Ratchford still cannot believe that the man who moved into the residential complex she once managed would go on to be accused of involvement in the darkest day in recent US history.
"It's almost impossible for me to wrap my head around who he said he was, and who he really is. I still struggle with that," she tells the BBC.
The man, Omar al-Bayoumi - a Saudi in his early 40s - moved to the complex in San Diego, California, with his family in September 1999.
The new resident at number 152 Parkwood Apartments quickly became a regular at Ratchford's pool parties. "He was always so bubbly and smiling," she recalls, "and just very, very friendly."
A few months later, Bayoumi would introduce Ratchford to two apparently unassuming, "polite" men, who would also become her neighbours.
The pair would become infamous for hijacking American Airlines flight 77, and crashing it into the Pentagon, in the 9/11 attacks.
Ratchford has been haunted by her connection to these three men for the past 25 years. She feels she was taken in by Bayoumi from the start.
"Whenever I had parties he would come and be a part of the activities," she recalls, adding that his family would invite her in for food.
But Bayoumi, the one-time resident of 152 Parkwood, is now at the centre of the $1 trillion (£733bn) lawsuit brought against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by several thousand families of victims and as well as survivors of 9/11.
On 11 September 2001, four passenger aircraft were hijacked by 19 members of the Islamist extremist network, al-Qaeda. In addition to the crash at the Pentagon - the US military's headquarters near Washington DC - two planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing both buildings to collapse. A fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, following resistance from passengers on board.
In all, almost 3,000 people were killed, including about 300 firefighters and other emergency workers at the World Trade Center.
Bayoumi is alleged to have facilitated the 9/11 plot through the support he provided for the first two hijackers to arrive in the US - Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar - who lived at Parkwood for several months prior to the attacks.
The federal judge in the 9/11 families' lawsuit in New York found a year ago that the evidence created "a reasonable inference" that Bayoumi and a Saudi diplomat based in the US had been "co-ordinating with the Saudi government when providing assistance to the hijackers".
The judge's ruling has allowed the families' case to move forward. Saudi Arabia is appealing it and, together with Bayoumi, has always denied the allegations.
Ever since the attacks, Bayoumi has been the subject of reporting and speculation.
Ratchford - who saw him interacting with the hijackers and witnessed him providing a crucial act of support for them - has given a sealed declaration to the New York court.
But she has never spoken publicly about what she saw.
After unwittingly becoming embroiled in the investigation into what the US government has described as "the most egregious criminal act on American soil in modern history", she moved about as far from humanity as you can get in the United States.
I tracked her down to the high desert in the western US - rattlesnake country. She told me she avoided the news, and definitely did not speak to journalists. But, to my surprise, she agreed to talk.
Her interview with me casts doubt on the version of events Bayoumi has told police, the FBI and the New York court, and features in the BBC Radio 4 podcast, Intrigue: A 9/11 Story , and an upcoming BBC Panorama, 9/11: The Saudi Connection .
Twenty-five years on from the deadliest terror attack in history, Jane McMullen asks why thousands of grieving families are still fighting for answers.
Listen on Sounds In early 1999, Ratchford landed on her feet. Life before then had been untethered - she had moved around, been married, pregnant and divorced before she was 21. But now, aged 27, she had a job she loved and a home.
As the new property manager of Parkwood Apartments, a squat complex of 175 low-rise apartments and townhouses in the San Diego suburbs, she says she excelled. Properties were never empty for long. But it was not the paperwork, nor the healthy pay check, that made the job a dream, it was the people.
Ratchford not only worked at Parkwood, she lived there too. Her clients were also her neighbours. And many were more than that - she says they became her friends.
"I always told my staff: 'You make them feel like this is their home, and they'll stay,'" she recalls.
As Ratchford made her mark at Parkwood, she was happy and secure in the world she had built - a world in which she knew everyone and everything.
Then, things fell apart in a dramatic and unexpected way.
Omar al-Bayoumi moved into Parkwood claiming to be a mature student.
"I knew he was going to school. I'm not sure, other than that, what he did," Ratchford says.
More than two decades later, declassified FBI documents and court filings would reveal that Bayoumi's studies had, in effect, come to a halt in 1998. He was spending much more time organising religious activities in the Muslim community, which he often videotaped.
His constant filming, and his inquiring questions, aroused suspicions.
"It was a general consensus of people in the San Diego Muslim community that Bayoumi was an operative of the Saudi intelligence service," Richard Lambert, who led the city's FBI office investigation after 9/11, tells me.
But it was not Ratchford's business to pry. What mattered to her was whether he could pay the rent. And he could.
The FBI would later discover he was being paid about $90,000 (£55,600 at the time) a year.
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Home videos show Bayoumi visiting Las Vegas and SeaWorld, and playing poolside with family
Bayoumi presented himself as an ordinary family man.…
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