Terry Strada, widow of 9/11 victim Tom Strada, shook up the ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks Friday by issuing a ringing denunciation of Saudi Arabia, the home nation of 15 of the 19 Al Qaeda hijackers who caused America’s darkest day.
Strada, whose husband was one of 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees killed shortly after hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower, asked aloud after reading Tom’s name: “How can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?”
Strada, the national chair of 9/11 Families United for Justice, argued that the US partner “fomented a rancid culture of anti-American terrorism around the globe and then sent its agents to support radical Islamist hijackers so they could attack you and all of our loved ones.”
“For 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families,” Strada continued as several spectators at the memorial service cheered.
“They broke promises, both public and private. It has been one betrayal after another,” added the widow.
The ceremony was attended by former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who offered no visible reaction to Strada’s comments.
Recognizing Vice President JD Vance, who attended the ceremony on behalf of the Trump administration, Strada said: “Tell the Saudis to stop lying. Tell them that if they want to be friends with the USA, they cannot continue to deny all of this, all of the pain, all of the destruction that we have been suffering through.
“Vice President Vance, thank you for being here today,” she concluded. “Please carry that message back. Stand with the families. Stand with survivors. Stand with Americans. As my husband Tom would have said, that is always the right thing to do.”
Strada’s organization has pursued legal action for years that would hold the Kingdom liable for the attacks that killed 2,977 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa.
Next month, a federal appeals panel in Manhattan will hear arguments focused on one shadowy figure, Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who helped secure California lodging for a pair of American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers – but who left the country for the UK about a year before 9/11.
He was questioned at the request of the US and held by British authorities, but was never charged, and eventually moved back to Saudi Arabia.
A 1999 video, unsealed by court order in 2024, shows al-Bayoumi, who had murky government ties and a web of official contacts, and who according to a 2017 FBI memo was on the payroll of Saudi intelligence – filming the US Capitol and talking about a “plan.”
Lawyers for the victims’ families say al-Bayoumi was “casing” the building – with 30 minutes of footage of the hour-long video revealing the iconic building’s entrances, showing its security procedures, and even its interior columns.
The 2004 9/11 Commission report said there was a high probability that the Capitol was the intended target of United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.
Another video, from February 2000, shows a “welcome party” al-Bayoumi threw for the future hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, soon after they moved to San Diego, Calif.
The Saudi government has long denied any role whatsoever in the planning of the attacks.
