The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which covers Alabama, Florida and Georgia, ruled on Monday that survivors and relatives of the victims of a 2019 terrorist attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola, in Florida, can proceed with a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia after a lower court dismissed their case.
In a unanimous opinion by Stanley Marcus, the three-judge panel affirmed most of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida’s decision to throw out the case for lack of jurisdiction under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.
The three judges identified one exception. “One group, or bundle, of the plaintiffs’ claims—those based on the theory that the kingdom had been grossly negligent in vetting, hiring and sending airman al-Shamrani to the United States—is facially sufficient to survive the jurisdictional attack,” Marcus wrote.
Mohammed Saeed al-Shamrani was a second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force who came to the United States in 2017 to take part in a Pentagon-sponsored pilot training program for foreign nationals. In 2019, he shot 11 people at Naval Air Station Pensacola, killing three, before police shot and killed him.
In early 2020, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the attack. William Barr, then the U.S. attorney general, said that al-Shamrani was “motivated by jihadist ideology” and had “posted other anti-American, anti-Israeli and jihadi messages on social media.”
The 11th Circuit’s ruling, which allows the survivors and families of al-Shamrani’s victims to proceed with their lawsuit, hinges on a potential ambiguity in the text of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The judges held that the plaintiffs’ claims included acts of gross negligence on the part of Saudi Arabia and not just “mere negligence” that remains immune under the law. (JNS sought comment from the Saudi embassy in Washington.)
“As we see it, the foundation for the plaintiffs’ gross negligence claim under Florida law contains far more than acts of omission,” Marcus wrote. “It includes allegations of multiple acts of commission, including the kingdom’s adoption of al-Shamrani’s form DS-160 and A-2 visa application, the kingdom’s conduct in affirmatively forwarding these materials to the United States and its conduct in sending al-Shamrani to the United States first to learn English and then for aviation training at NAS Pensacola.”
The appellate court affirmed the district court’s dismissal of most of the plaintiffs’ other claims, because they were acts of omission on the part of Saudi Arabia, such as failing to inform the United States of al-Shamrani’s extremist views or failing to identify those views in the first place during the vetting process.
Marcus, a Reagan nominee, was joined in his opinion by judges Jill Pryor, an Obama nominee, and Britt Grant, a Trump nominee.
The surviving portions of the suit have been remanded to district court.
