Before September 2001, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan worked twelve-hour days at a newsstand in Newark Penn Station, selling newspapers to people travelling into Manhattan. Many of those commuters were going to the World Trade Center. The two men ate fast food at lunch, drank cold beer after work, and went home to a small, dirty apartment in Jersey City. They cooked dinner on an old stove and rented action movies from the video store. Like many other immigrants, they sent money home to India.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the two men flew out of Newark Airport for San Antonio. Their plane was grounded in St. Louis soon after the attacks, so they bought seats on a train to Texas. They were carrying two box cutters, black hair dye and about $5,600 in cash. They told the authorities they were going to open a fruit stand. On September 12, police took them off the train in Fort Worth.
At first nobody suspected terrorism. The police thought they might be smuggling drugs, because they had paid cash for their tickets just before the train left and seemed nervous. They were held for possible immigration problems, and their Jersey City apartment was searched that weekend.
Then the details began to look different. The arrest report said both men were extremely nervous when officers came to them. Investigators found that they had received money transfers. The FBI also noticed their short hair and shaved bodies, and thought this might be a sign that they had prepared to die in an attack.
Box cutters were the weapons the hijackers were said to have used. Within a week, newspapers were printing the two names, the cash, the hair dye and the knives.
Neither man was ever charged with anything connected to September 11. They were held as material witnesses, which means people kept because they might know something useful, in a federal detention centre in Manhattan. The FBI said almost nothing in public. A former roommate, Rashed Mazhar, told reporters that the two had lost their jobs at the newsstand and were travelling to San Antonio to find work in a convenience store, and that they were not terrorists.
What the men were really hiding was much smaller. They had got their passports through a corrupt passport agent. Khan’s real name was Gul Mohammed Shah. Azmath had said he was older than he was in order to get a visa. His wife, Tasleem Murad, told The New York Times that her husband was not the first person to lie about his age for a visa, that he had no evil intentions, and that he had already paid for it.
The case that finally came to court was about credit card fraud. In New York, before Judge Lawrence M. McKenna, the two men were charged with planning credit card fraud. The result was twelve months and one day in prison and three years of supervision after release.
Their time in detention lasted fourteen months.
Azmath arrived in Hyderabad at two in the morning on a Friday in January 2003, cleared of the terrorism claims. He was thirty-two. He said the FBI had shown him a flying licence and told him he was a pilot. “They told me I was one of those who attacked the WTC, that I was from Egypt,” he said. They told him he would never see his family again. “The prison lights used to be switched on 24 hours, I was not allowed to sleep and for a number of days I was kept in freezing temperatures.” Asked what he would do next, he said he would rest for a few days and begin all over again.