The 9/11 security lawsuit landscape is dominated today by the case against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which in August 2025 cleared its final jurisdictional hurdle and is moving toward a trial on whether Saudi government employees provided material support to the hijackers. The parallel body of litigation against the airlines and their pre-attack screening contractors ended years ago in confidential settlements, and separate cases against Iran, the Taliban, and Sudan continue to generate judgments, appeals, and attempts to collect.
Where the Saudi Arabia Case Stands
The centerpiece of the litigation is In re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, a multidistrict case consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It was originally filed in 2002 and 2003 and now involves roughly 10,000 families and insurers seeking damages from Saudi Arabia under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. It has been described as the largest and longest-active case in the federal court system.
On August 28, 2025, Judge George B. Daniels denied Saudi Arabia’s motion to dismiss in a 45-page opinion. He found that plaintiffs had presented sufficient evidence to infer that two Saudi government employees provided an “essential support network” for hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar after they arrived in the United States in January 2000. Those two employees were Omar al-Bayoumi, officially an accountant on the Saudi government payroll, and Fahad al-Thumairy, an imam at a Los Angeles mosque who also held an accredited diplomatic position at the Saudi consulate there. Judge Daniels wrote that their alleged activities were “inconsistent with” their official job titles and that the evidence was enough to establish they acted within the scope of their employment for the Saudi state.
The ruling closed out a jurisdictional question that had consumed years. Judge Daniels had already found in 2018 that the alleged conduct met JASTA’s causation requirement. The 2025 decision resolved the remaining question of whether the two men acted in their official capacity, clearing the path toward trial. Saudi Arabia has denied the allegations, calling claims of prior knowledge or involvement by its officials “categorically false,” and is appealing the ruling. Some legal observers have suggested the kingdom might consider a settlement to avoid the discovery a full trial would bring, but as of mid-2026 no settlement talks had been publicly reported.
The Evidence Behind the Ruling
Plaintiffs built their case from FBI investigative files, declassified government documents, and materials seized by British police from Bayoumi’s properties in September 2001.
In September 2021, the Biden administration declassified a 16-page FBI report from an investigation called “Operation ENCORE.” It described Bayoumi’s meeting with the hijackers as “preplanned” and “well-orchestrated,” a characterization that contradicted the 9/11 Commission’s earlier account of a chance encounter. The report also placed both Bayoumi and Thumairy within “a degree or two of separation” from known international terrorists on a phone tree.
A 71-page redacted brief filed in May 2024 laid out the alleged support network in detail: helping the hijackers obtain driver’s licenses and a car, arranging housing, assisting with immigration and communications, and introducing them to local sympathizers. It documented phone traffic between Thumairy, Bayoumi, and the Saudi embassy in Washington at moments when the hijackers needed logistical help.
Among the more striking items recovered from Bayoumi’s U.K. properties: a videotape that plaintiffs describe as a welcome party for the two hijackers arranged by Bayoumi and Thumairy, and another tape showing Bayoumi filming the structural features, entrances, and security posts of the U.S. Capitol while narrating to his “esteemed brothers.” British police also recovered a notepad in Bayoumi’s handwriting containing a sketch of an airplane alongside mathematical equations that aviation experts testified are consistent with calculating a plane’s line-of-sight distance to the ground from a given altitude. In a 2021 deposition, Bayoumi acknowledged the sketch and equations were his but said they might have been a high school math exercise he was trying to remember. Judge Daniels specifically cited the plane sketch and equations as evidence that “facially connects Bayoumi with knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.”
Why the Saudi Case Could Be Filed at All
For more than a decade, sovereign immunity blocked 9/11 families from suing Saudi Arabia. Under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, foreign governments are generally immune from lawsuits in U.S. courts. An exception exists for countries the State Department designates as state sponsors of terrorism, but Saudi Arabia has never carried that designation.
Families first tried to use the FSIA’s noncommercial tort exception, which allows suits over injuries occurring on U.S. soil. The Second Circuit rejected that approach in 2008, reasoning that applying the tort exception to terrorism claims would undermine the narrower terrorism exception Congress had specifically written. A different Second Circuit panel reversed course in 2011 in a case involving Afghanistan, and by 2013 the 9/11 claims were remanded. But the district court dismissed the claims again, this time on the ground that the alleged tortious conduct did not occur entirely within the United States.
Congress resolved the impasse in September 2016 by passing the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act over President Obama’s veto. JASTA created a new exception to sovereign immunity for any foreign state whose agents committed or materially supported acts of international terrorism causing injury in the United States, regardless of where the planning or support took place. It also allowed secondary liability claims for aiding, abetting, or conspiracy, and it applies retroactively to injuries from September 11, 2001, forward.
JASTA has real limits. The U.S. government can intervene in any suit against a foreign state and seek indefinite stays by certifying that “good-faith discussions” toward a resolution are underway. And a plaintiff who wins a judgment still faces the FSIA’s separate protections against seizing a foreign state’s assets in the United States unless another exception to attachment immunity applies.
Airlines and Airport Screening Contractors
A separate track of 9/11 security lawsuits went after the airlines and the private companies that screened passengers before the attacks. Those cases were consolidated before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in the Southern District of New York.
Before September 11, aviation security was overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration, with the actual screening outsourced by airlines to private contractors. The Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, signed on September 22, 2001, shaped the entire legal landscape for the airline claims. It capped each airline’s liability at the amount of its insurance coverage, barred punitive damages, and channeled all suits into a single federal court in Manhattan. The same statute created the original September 11th Victim Compensation Fund as an alternative to litigation, and families who accepted an award waived their right to sue.
Of the nearly 3,000 people killed, the vast majority of families chose the fund. Only 96 wrongful death and personal injury claims were pursued in court against the airlines and their security contractors, among them Huntleigh USA Corp., which handled screening for United Airlines at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Every one of those cases settled before trial, on confidential terms. As of March 2009, 92 of the 95 then-resolved cases had settled for a combined total of roughly $500 million. The last wrongful death claim was resolved in September 2011. The total paid by the aviation insurance market for all third-party liability claims from the attacks came to less than $2 billion.
Parallel Cases Against Iran, the Taliban, and Sudan
The Saudi case is the most prominent, but it is not the only foreign-defendant track.
- Iran has never appeared to defend the 9/11 cases, and plaintiffs have secured multiple rounds of default judgments against it. As of June 2025, those judgments totaled billions of dollars across several rounds. In August 2024 alone, a New York federal court entered judgments totaling $144.7 billion against Iran and the Taliban combined. The U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund determined eligibility for 10,590 9/11 plaintiffs in 2020, and distributions have continued, most recently in June 2025.
- Plaintiffs also obtained default judgments against the Taliban years ago and have tried to reach roughly $3.5 billion in Afghan central bank funds held at the New York Federal Reserve. In August 2025, a divided Second Circuit panel ruled the assets are immune from attachment under the FSIA, and in March 2026 the full Second Circuit denied rehearing, with five judges dissenting. A Supreme Court petition is widely expected. Separately, plaintiffs have pending damages claims against the Taliban exceeding $55 billion.
- In September 2024, the Second Circuit confirmed that the case against Sudan should proceed to trial after the district court had denied Sudan’s sovereign immunity claim the previous year.
The Victim Compensation Fund and the Lawsuit Over It
Most 9/11 families never sued at all because they took payment from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The original fund, administered by Special Master Kenneth Feinberg, distributed over $7 billion to victims’ families between 2001 and 2004, with an award conditioned on waiving the right to sue.
The fund was reactivated in 2011 under the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which also created the World Trade Center Health Program for free medical monitoring and treatment of 9/11-related conditions. Congress reauthorized the fund in 2015 and made it permanent in July 2019 with the VCF Permanent Authorization Act, extending the filing deadline to October 1, 2090, and appropriating whatever funds are needed to pay all approved claims. As of early 2026, the reopened fund had awarded more than $16.8 billion to over 71,000 claimants, with nearly $2 billion distributed in 2025 alone. It is administered by Special Master Allison Turkel under the Department of Justice.
The fund itself is now the subject of a class action. In March 2023, a former Philadelphia firefighter filed White v. the United States in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, alleging that the government used a “bait-and-switch” in how it calculated certain awards. The complaint contends that claimants who waived their right to sue before December 2015 were later subjected to a less generous “Group B” calculation methodology imposed by a subsequent reauthorization, reducing their compensation by more than 35 percent compared to similarly situated claimants. The case remained pending as of early 2026.