For 25 years, Holly Ratchford has lived with an unsettling connection to the September 11 attacks.
Ratchford, who managed a residential complex in San Diego, California, where two of the 9/11 hijackers lived, has spoken publicly for the first time about her encounters with Omar al-Bayoumi, the Saudi national accused of helping the two men settle in the United States before the attacks.
Speaking to the BBC, Ratchford said she still finds it difficult to reconcile the warm, friendly man she knew with the allegations that later emerged about his activities.
“It’s almost impossible for me to wrap my head around who he said he was, and who he really is. I still struggle with that,” she said.
Bayoumi moved with his family into the Parkwood Apartments in September 1999 and quickly became a familiar face at Ratchford’s pool parties.
She remembered him as “always so bubbly and smiling” and “very, very friendly”.
Then, in February 2000, Bayoumi brought two men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, to Ratchford’s office. They were looking for an apartment.
The two men did not meet the complex’s income requirements, but Bayoumi agreed to co-sign their lease and also helped them open a bank account.
More than a year later, Hazmi and Mihdhar would become two of the 19 al-Qaeda members who hijacked four US passenger planes on September 11, 2001.
The pair were aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.
At the time, however, Ratchford said there was nothing about the men that raised suspicions.
“There was absolutely nothing unusual about them. They were nice, they were polite,” she told the BBC.
The shocking revelation after 9/11
Ratchford discovered who her former tenants were only after the attacks.
A woman who said she was seeking a rental reference later asked Ratchford whether she knew that the two men were terrorists who had flown a plane into the Pentagon.
“And I went, ‘What?’” Ratchford recalled.
The FBI interviewed her on September 14, 2001, just three days after the attacks, and obtained Bayoumi’s guarantor form.
Former FBI investigator Richard Lambert told the BBC that investigators subsequently identified what he described as “a network headed up by Omar al-Bayoumi”.
Bayoumi has for years faced allegations that he facilitated the hijackers’ activities while they were living in San Diego.
Allegations of a Saudi connection
The allegations surrounding Bayoumi have also become part of a wider legal battle over possible Saudi involvement in the events leading up to 9/11.
In an August 2025 ruling, a New York federal judge found that the evidence created a “reasonable inference” that Bayoumi and a Saudi diplomat had been coordinating with the Saudi government while assisting the hijackers.
Saudi Arabia and Bayoumi have denied the allegations. Saudi Arabia is appealing the ruling.
Ratchford, who has submitted a sealed declaration to the New York court, said her brief encounters with the three men have remained with her for a quarter of a century.
What once seemed like an ordinary interaction between a landlord and prospective tenants became, after the attacks, a connection to one of the darkest moments in modern American history.
“I still struggle” with the contradiction between the man she thought she knew and the allegations surrounding him, Ratchford said.
