Twelve-hour days at the Newark Penn Station newsstand, selling newspapers to commuters heading into Manhattan, many of them bound for the World Trade Center. Fast food at lunch, cold beers after work, then home to a shabby apartment in Jersey City, dinner cooked on an old stove and action movies rented from the local video store. Like many other immigrants, they sent money home to India.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan flew out of Newark Airport for San Antonio. Their flight was grounded in St. Louis shortly after the attacks, so they bought seats on an Amtrak 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 pulled them off the train in Fort Worth.
The first suspicion was not terrorism. They had been treated as possible drug smugglers, because they had paid cash for their tickets just before departure and seemed nervous when questioned. They were held for possible immigration violations, and their Jersey City apartment was searched that weekend.
Then the list of what they carried began to look different. The Fort Worth arrest report described both men as extremely nervous when officers approached them. Investigators found they had received money transfers. The FBI noted their closely cut hair and shaved bodies, and read this as a possible sign that they had prepared to die in an attack like the one that had just taken place.
Box cutters were the weapons said to have been used by the hijackers, and within a week the press was reporting the two names, the cash, the hair dye and the knives. On September 29, a Washington Post article quoted an anonymous source saying that both men had flight training.
Neither man was ever charged with anything to do with September 11. They were held as material witnesses in a federal detention centre in Manhattan, and the FBI said almost nothing publicly about why it was so interested in them. A former roommate, Rashed Mazhar, said on the record that the two had lost their newsstand jobs in Newark and were travelling to San Antonio to find work in a convenience store, and that they were not terrorists.
Six weeks after the arrest, President George W. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, officials used the new powers in scores of cases to hold mostly Arab and Muslim men indefinitely, many of them arrested only as witnesses and never brought before a court to testify. Azmath and Khan, whose real name was later established as Syed Gul Mohammed Shah, were two of them. Their ordeal lasted fourteen months.
What the two men were actually hiding was far smaller. They had obtained passports through a corrupt passport agent. Azmath had given a false, higher age to get a visa. His wife, Tasleem Murad, told The New York Times that her husband was hardly the first person to lie about his age for a visa, that he had no evil intentions and that he had paid for it already.
The criminal case that finally came to court looked nothing like the one the country had been reading about. Azmath and Shah were charged with conspiracy to commit credit card fraud. The sentence was twelve months and one day in prison and three years of supervised release.
Azmath reached Hyderabad at two in the morning on a Friday in January 2003, cleared of the terrorism allegations and convicted of the fraud. He was thirty-two. He said the FBI had shown him a flying licence and told him he was a pilot and a navigator. “They told me I was one of those who attacked the WTC, that I was from Egypt. They said they could do anything and also get my photographs and passport from that country,” he said. They told him he would never see his family again. “They said my punishment for attacking the WTC would be death penalty. 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.