Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan worked twelve hours a day at a newsstand in Newark Penn Station. They sold newspapers to people who were travelling to Manhattan. Many of these people worked at the World Trade Center. In the evening the two men went home to a small apartment in Jersey City. They cooked dinner and watched action movies. Like many immigrants, they sent money home to India.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the two men flew from Newark Airport to San Antonio. Their plane had to stop in St. Louis after the attacks. So they bought train tickets to Texas. They had two box cutters, black hair dye and about $5,600 in cash. They said they wanted to open a fruit stand. On September 12, police took them off the train in Fort Worth.
At first the police thought the men sold drugs, because they paid cash and looked nervous. The police held them for immigration problems and searched their apartment.
But the hijackers of September 11 also used box cutters. Newspapers wrote about the two names, the money, the hair dye and the knives. The men were never charged with anything about September 11. They were held in a prison in Manhattan for fourteen months. A friend, Rashed Mazhar, said they had lost their newsstand jobs and were going to San Antonio to find work in a shop. He said they were not terrorists.
Their real secret was small. They had got their passports from a bad passport agent. Khan’s real name was Gul Mohammed Shah. Azmath had said he was older than he really was, because he wanted a visa.
In the end, a court in New York charged the two men with credit card fraud. The punishment was twelve months and one day in prison and three years of supervision.
Azmath arrived in Hyderabad at two in the morning on a Friday in January 2003. He was thirty-two. He said the FBI showed him a flying licence and told him he was a pilot. They told him he was one of the men who attacked the World Trade Center. They said he would never see his family again. He said the prison lights were on all day and all night, so he could not sleep. He also said he was kept in very cold rooms for many days. When people asked about his plans, he said he would rest for a few days and then start again.