A San Diego Apartment Manager Speaks Out: Her Link to Two 9/11 Hijackers and the Saudi Man Who Allegedly Helped Them
Holly Ratchford, who managed the Parkwood Apartments residential complex in San Diego, California, has spoken publicly for the first time about her connection to two of the 9/11 hijackers and the Saudi man who allegedly helped them settle in the United States. Ratchford says she was introduced to the two men by Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national then in his early 40s, who moved into apartment 152 at the Parkwood complex with his family in September 1999. The two men Bayoumi introduced to Ratchford would later hijack American Airlines Flight 77 and crash it into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. BBC News
Ratchford says she has been haunted by her connection to Bayoumi and the two hijackers for 25 years and that she felt she was taken in by Bayoumi. Her account emerges as part of a new BBC Radio 4 podcast series titled "A 9/11 Story," released in 2026, which the BBC says reveals new details about the September 11 attacks. BBC Media Centre
Bayoumi sits at the centre of a $1 trillion (approximately £733 billion) lawsuit brought against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by thousands of families of 9/11 victims and survivors. He is alleged to have facilitated the 9/11 plot through the support he provided for the first two hijackers to arrive in the US. BBC News
The lawsuit's focus on a Saudi student who may have been a spy has been reported by ProPublica, which detailed how families of 9/11 victims are pursuing Saudi Arabia over its alleged role. ProPublica Lawyers in the case have said they possess new evidence, including sworn testimony, that agents of Saudi Arabia "directly and knowingly" helped the hijackers. Associated Press
A declassified FBI report has linked a senior Saudi official to a suspected spy who helped plane hijackers. President Biden authorized the declassification of the secret FBI report detailing Saudi nationals' connections to the 9/11 attacks in 2021. Families of 9/11 victims said the declassified FBI document validates their claim that Saudi Arabia played a role in the attacks. NPR Motley Rice
The broader context here is a quarter-century of mounting, if still contested, evidence linking elements of Saudi officialdom to the 9/11 plot's logistics. Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks, 15 were Saudi nationals. The 9/11 Commission Report, the official US government investigation into the attacks, remains the baseline government account. The declassified FBI material has opened further investigative threads that the civil litigation is now pursuing. Families argue the cumulative weight of sworn testimony, declassified intelligence, and witness accounts like Ratchford's establishes a chain of facilitation that reaches from a San Diego apartment complex to the Saudi state.
The attacks themselves unfolded on September 11, 2001, when four passenger aircraft were hijacked by 19 members of the al-Qaeda network. Two planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. One crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people were killed, including about 300 firefighters and other emergency workers at the World Trade Center. BBC News
Ratchford's testimony adds a ground-level perspective to a case that has otherwise been built on intelligence documents, diplomatic cables, and legal filings. Her account places Bayoumi not as an abstract figure in a court brief but as a neighbor who introduced his landlord to the men who would murder nearly 3,000 people. Whether her public statement shifts the trajectory of the trillion-dollar litigation is a question for the courts. What it does is put a human face on the San Diego corridor of the 9/11 support network, a stretch of the conspiracy that investigators have long treated as among the most consequential and least fully explained.
