A California apartment manager who unknowingly rented homes to two of the Saudi hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks is now describing how easily the men won over neighbors, saying they came across as “very, very friendly” in the San Diego-area community.
“I would have cookies and tea with them,” Holly Ratchford, the former manager of Parkwood Apartments, said in her first public remarks about her unexpected connection to the terrorists.
“It wasn’t like they were just someone that came into the office and rented from us,” she told the BBC.
Ratchford, who also lived at the complex, rented apartments to Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Both men later joined the five hijackers who seized American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.
The pair had been introduced to her by Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who moved into the complex in 1999. His alleged ties to the Saudi government are now a key focus of a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims, who accuse Saudi Arabia of complicity in the attacks ahead of their 25th anniversary next month.
Even years later, Ratchford said she remembers how seamlessly the future hijackers fit in. “There was absolutely nothing unusual about them. They were nice, they were polite,” she said.
Ratchford said al-Bayoumi also gained her trust, presenting himself as a student while allegedly concealing government connections that some investigators believe may have overlapped with Saudi intelligence.
“I bought into everything that he told me,” Ratchford said. “I really thought that’s how he was.”
al-Bayoumi had a townhouse by the pool in the complex, and would regularly attend pool parties Ratchford hosted, the outlet reported.
“He was always so bubbly and smiling,” she said, calling him “very, very friendly.”
According to her account, al-Bayoumi vouched for his two terrorist buddies when they at first tried to rent a one-bedroom apartment from Ratchford by paying in cash, saying he knew them from his mosque.
“It was a general consensus of people in the San Diego Muslim community that Bayoumi was an operative of the Saudi intelligence service,” Richard Lambert, who led the city’s FBI office investigation after 9/11, told the BBC.
The Saudi national also had a sketch book with a drawing of a plane and an equation in it. He cosigned on the two mens’ rental agreement, and helped them set up a bank account.
al-Bayoumi told investigators he met the pair at a Middle Eastern restaurant in LA. According to the FBI, he was being paid by a contractor for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority.
Some of Ratchford’s comments appear to clash with comments al-Bayoumi made to British authorities following the 9/11 attacks where he distanced himself from the two terrorists.
Ratchford says al-Bayoumi and the hijackers were “definitely friendly.”
al-Bayoumi was released and was not charged with a crime. He moved to Saudi Arabia in 2002.
According to an FBI report released in 2021, al-Bayoumi said he met Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar “by chance.” One source quoted in the report said Bayoumi held “very high status” inside the Saudi consulate in LA.
It wasn’t until 2024 that a video clip of Bayoumi that showed him filming the US Capitol and referencing a “plan” was unsealed and released in connection with the lawsuit
Attorneys for the 9/11 families of the 2,977 victims of the terror attacks continue to fight in court for compensation — and are relying in part on Bayoumi’s role to claim the Saudi government should be held liable for the attacks.
Riyadh has categorically denied that it was involved in preparations for the heinous attacks, and is fighting the families’ claims in court.
A federal judge in 2025 ruled that Sept. 11 families could continue the trial, citing circumstantial evidence that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia assisted the hijackers, citing the “inference” that the government had employed al-Bayoumi.
