The "Tribute in Lights" is reflected on the 9/11 Memorial on September 11, 2014 in New York City. This year marks the 13th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and on Flight 93. (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)The "Tribute in Lights" is reflected on the 9/11 Memorial on September 11, 2014 . (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
Attorneys for the victims’ families said the evidence includes sworn testimony from the so-called 20th hijacker, and from three principals of the U.S. government’s two primary probes of the attacks.
Saudi Arabia’s lawyers claim in papers filed in Manhattan federal court late Friday that there is no evidence the country supported or caused the attacks. They urged the judge to dismiss the claims, saying the lawyers for the victims’ families “have had enough chances to make their case.”
The lawyers also asked the judge to consider the merits of the civil litigation to disregard claims by al-Qaida member Zacarias Moussaoui, WCBS 880’s Monica Miller reported.
Moussaoui is serving a life prison sentence after pleading guilty in April 2005 to conspiring with the hijackers to kill Americans.
They called his comments to plaintiffs’ lawyers last year “colorful but immaterial hearsay statements” from a convicted, mentally ill terrorist. Before jurors spared Moussaoui’s life, a psychologist testified for the defense at death penalty proceedings that he had paranoid schizophrenia.
Moussaoui said it was a lie that Saudi Arabia cut ties with al-Qaida and bin Laden in 1994.
According to papers filed in court Friday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the efforts by Saudi Arabia to be dismissed from the litigation “rest on grave distortions of the record, implausible interpretations of the allegations, facts and evidence, and a refusal to afford plaintiffs the obvious inferences to which they are entitled.”
Lawyers for Saudi Arabia argue the families are relying on the submission of “thousands of pages of inadmissible and irrelevant materials.”
They wrote: “If they had a single piece of evidence that would stand up in court, they would highlight it in their papers. Instead, they focus heavily on witnesses manifestly lacking personal knowledge, and on newspaper articles, blog posts, and similar multiple hearsay. They thus reveal that they have nothing better.”
