A 25-year-old video has come to light of a man identified by the FBI as a Saudi intelligence agent filming locations in the center of Washington three months before Al-Qaida decided to carry out the 9/11 attacks.

The footage, shot in the summer of 1999 and in the possession of the FBI, was unsealed in a court action by families of the victims of 9/11, who claim that Saudi Arabia’s government was complicit in the event, which the country’s rulers deny.

The film was initially found by UK investigators in Bayoumi’s flat in the days after the attack in 2001, when he was a PhD student at Aston University in Birmingham.

An FBI report declassified in March 2022 presented evidence of “a 50/50 chance [Bayoumi] had advanced knowledge the 9/11 attacks were to occur” from his relationship with Hazmi and Mihdhar.

Another bureau report declassified the year before says he gave significant help to the pair after their arrival in the US, and communicated with a key logistics facilitator for Osama bin Laden each time he assisted them.

The official 9/11 Commission report, a 585-page document published in 2004 from the findings of an inquiry set up by the US government, concluded that intelligence failures on the part of the CIA and FBI were primarily to blame for the attack.

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