The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan heard arguments Wednesday on whether the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can shield itself from a historic civil lawsuit accusing it of aiding and abetting the September 11 hijackers. Relatives of those murdered in the 2001 attacks monitored proceedings closely in New York. The appellate hearing follows a consequential August 2025 ruling that left the kingdom vulnerable to civil tort damages in the long-running litigation.
U.S. District Judge George Daniels previously determined that victims’ families had presented “plausible evidence” that the Saudi government—which has consistently denied any involvement in the attacks—maintained an operational support network for the terrorists. The judge ruled that a reasonable jury could infer that Omar al-Bayoumi, a mysterious Saudi national who assisted two hijackers from American Airlines Flight 77 with housing and financial logistics in California, acted in coordination with Saudi government officials.
According to court records, al-Bayoumi, long suspected of being an operative for Saudi intelligence, hosted a “welcome party” for two of the future hijackers, possessed technical flight calculations that could be utilized to direct an aircraft toward specific coordinates, and was captured on surveillance video surveilling the U.S. Capitol complex. Saudi state attorneys are appealing Judge Daniels’s decision, reiterating before the panel on Wednesday that Riyadh enjoys jurisdictional immunity from legal claims in U.S. courts under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
Those assertions drew fierce backlash from bereaved families. “The kingdom continues to lie in court and deny all culpability, even as the evidentiary record proves its agents were directly tied to the attacks,” said Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United, whose husband was killed in the North Tower. The sprawling litigation, first initiated in 2004, contends that religious extremists embedded within the Saudi state apparatus directed vital resources to the conspirators.
In total, 2,977 people were murdered on September 11, 2001, when 19 al-Qaeda hijackers—15 of them Saudi nationals—commandeered four commercial jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Oral arguments concluded after about 45 minutes on Wednesday, and the three-judge appellate panel took the matter under advisement before issuing a written opinion later.