The Justice Department announced on Thursday that it would finally name the Saudi official with alleged ties to the al-Qaeda perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Responding to years of pressure from the families of those killed in the attacks, the Justice Department and its law-enforcement arm, the FBI, decided to declassify the name of the Saudi official “in light of the extraordinary circumstances of this particular case.”
The Justice Department did not say when they would make the name public.
Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from Washington, DC said the name would be revealed first to the court and the families of the victims.
“Then it is expected that the lawyers will appeal to the Justice Department to have the name released publicly,” he said.
The case has long threatened to embarrass the Saudi government, which has repeatedly denied links to al-Qaeda, and would leave it exposed to claims of damages that could reach billions of dollars.
The person is the last of three main officials in Saudi Arabia referred to in an FBI report into the attacks and allegedly assisted some of the attackers after they arrived in the US.
In all 19 men, 15 of them Saudis, took part in the plot to hijack four commercial aircraft and crash them into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and possibly the White House or Congress.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and families have sued seeking damages from the Saudi government.
An official report into the attacks in 2002 said that some of the attackers had received funds from Saudi officials, “at least two” of whom were “alleged by some to be Saudi intelligence officers.”
The two were Fahad al-Thumairy and Omar al-Bayoumi, who were attached to Saudi Arabia’s US embassy at the time.
Subsequent investigations rejected the claim that they were involved with the hijackers.
But in 2012, a redacted FBI report repeated the allegations and referred to a third person who may have directed them, but blacked out his name.