Like the rest of the world’s political space, he remembers his life as before and after 9/11. It became a most tragic chapter of his life – the episode to which he had nothing to do with but has everything to relate to.
By Mohd Ismail Khan, TwoCircles.net,
Hyderabad: In the ever chaotic narrow lanes behind the Charminar, the iconic 16th century monument, deep inside stays a man in late 40s, keeping a deliberate low profile.
Caught in the vicious net of US’ World Trade Centre attack, Mohammed Azmath was the first to be arrested on suspicion due to his religion and name and became a terror accused to rot in American prison, only to be released later for a life completely shattered. A polite well mannered gentleman, he had since returned to Hyderabad and earns a living looking after his father’s auto-spare parts business.
Last week, the US senate select committee study report of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Programme, for the first time, gave an official credential to the allegations of violations of international laws and human rights of terror suspects while in American custody. This prompted Azmath to open up the tragic chapter of his life, hoping that at least now someone will pay heed to his suffering.
Azmath and his childhood friend Gul Mohammed Shah went to the USA in 1993. Life before 9/11 was peaceful, where he and Gul worked at different business establishments and earned a decent amount. After working under different employers for a decade in New Jersey, they decided to open their own business – a fruit stall – at San Antonio. It was on the fateful day of September 11 in 2001 that Azmath and Gul chose to take a flight from New York to San Antonio.
Beginning of hardships
Airborne that morning, they were oblivious to the outside world that had changed forever. At St Louis their flight was grounded, just like thousands others that day. At the airport, Azmath saw the breaking news on television with images of twin towers falling down.
There was no clarity when the flight operations will resume so Azmath and Gul decided to continue the journey ahead by train. “Whole night we travelled in the train, next day, at nearly 4 pm, our train was stopped near Dallas in Texas. Drug Enforcement (DE) agents singled us out and confiscated all our belongings,” Azmath recalls, narrating the beginning of the tragedies that were to come.
If the DE picking them up was not shocking enough, thing that came next shook the earth beneath their feet. When Azmath asked DE agents why they were detained, they said FBI wanted to interrogate them. Two regular men – Azmath and Gul – from Hyderabad bothered more about sending money home every month than anything else – thus became the first persons to be detained on terror suspicion after 9/11.
The FBI interrogators pressed over and over only on one thing: “You guys are from Saudi Arabia.” “We told them we are Indians, our families live in India and we never been to Saudi. But the interrogators kept on pressing that we are Arabs.”
A day later, they were shifted to Metropolitan Detention Center at Brooklyn in New York. Azmath and Gul thought they will be let off soon after another round of questioning. But this round of interrogation went on for three months, painful and torturous and without access to any legal aid or outside world.
Interrogations were mentally taxing; eight officers from different departments sat together to question them for 10 hours at a stretch. “They showed pictures of 9/11 victims and said ‘You are responsible for this’, ‘we will never spare you’; ‘you will be hanged to death’,” Azmath says with head down remembering every vivid detail of the horror.
After three months, Azmath was put on polygraph test. “One question, whether I had prior knowledge of 9/11 was stressed on by interrogator. They were bribing me with offer of release, if I conceded, or ‘you will rot and die in jail’ if I answered in negative.”
TV screen grab
Despite veiled and open threats, Azmath stuck to his ground, pleading innocence. Outside, Azmath and Gul were already branded as ‘dreaded terrorists’, ‘master minds’, and ‘hijacker number 20 and 21’. Every national news channel in the US ran their images, told Americans that Azmath and Gul were planning to hijack the plane they were travelling from New York to San Antonio. Worst, FBI officials gave statements linking them to global terror groups.
FBI later claimed they had monitored Azmath and Gul since their landing at St Louis airport due to obvious racial profiling immediately after the World Trade Centre strike. It was FBI that tipped DEA to arrest them from the moving train.
The “hard evidence” they showed to weigh their arguments was: Azmath and Gul were travelling with box cutter knives same as 9/11 hijackers allegedly had, a hair dye and $5000 in cash. It was later found out that those box cutter knives were used by Azmath to open newspaper bundles at the news stall they were working at New Jersey and the $5,000 cash was to start the fruit business at San Antonio.
The hysteric media nevertheless gave Azmath and Gul a new moniker to suit the new dictionary of war against terror: the ‘box cutter suspects’. CNN visited the apartment they stayed in New Jersey and ran as breaking news that box cutter detainees prayed at the same mosque as the previous World Trade Centre bombing accused did. The news anchor presenting the above ‘facts’ said ‘All the puzzles lead us back to Osama Bin Laden’.
Back home here at Hyderabad, Azmath’s family was shocked to death. Local media made sure they didn’t lag behind their western colleagues. His wife Tasleem, a Pakistani national, was hounded along with their one-year-old child. State government slammed a case against her and started the proceedings to deport her to Pakistan. It was only after the intervention of the High Court, she and her child were saved.
During the days of 9/11 due to the conditions in which terror suspects were kept in the Metropolitan Detention Center it became popular as Abu Gharib of New York. Azmath concedes: “When I hear about cases of Guantanamo Bay, I find no difference with the treatment given to us in MDC. It was the same kind of torture tactics.”
Azmath and Gul were kept on 9th floor of the detention centre, which authorities called ‘special cases’ floor. In 10X10 rooms, they were locked for 24X7. The norm was to give fresh air to solitary confinement prisoner for at least an hour. “They didn’t follow it otherwise, but in winter, to torture us further, they used to leave the cage cells open for 7-8 hours without providing any warm cloths leaving us to freeze,” he remembers.
Bright focus lights and CCTV cameras 24X7 flashing in their cells, made it difficult for them to sleep. If by chance, they managed to nap, guards banged the doors waking them up, shouting and calling them ‘the terrorist,’ ‘the bomber,’ ‘the 9/11 guy’ and ‘Al Qaeda men.”
Most of the time, Azmath claimed he faced physical assault from the detention guards during strip searches. “Whenever we had a visitor, our lawyer or anyone, or we were being shifted to court or any other room, guards used to assault us by strip searching and keeping foot on the chains of the shackles we were bounded in.” Every time they were brought out of their solitary confinement cells, they were wrapped in shackles.
Image of the World Trade Centre attack memorial (Courtesy: Zimbio.com)
Azmath said they were nearly 100 men like him who were picked up on similar suspicion, all belonging to same religion, kept in solitary confinement cells in same special cases floor. Lot of people in solitary confinement tried to commit suicide, hardly any men came out with stable mind. Azmath and Gul were kept there for over a year, a not-at-all easy time to cope with; really difficult times of his life.
According to America’s Justice Department figures, Azmath and Gul were among the 765 immigrants detained on terror suspicion after September 11, 2001. After long incarceration, almost all of them were deported and all of them still await justice.
Finally the freedom
After 18 months of incarceration, venomous statements and headlines declaring them as ‘dreaded terrorists’, Azmath and Gul were charged with a visa fraud case and discharged immediately. The authorities had put them in custody for so long and invested so much of time, even travelled to India to investigate, but found nothing. “For a face saver, they had to charge us with something. So they did and deported us back to India. But at the end of the day, they found nothing (in the terror attack related case) against us,” he asserts.
US judge Shira Scheindlin, who was presiding over Azmath’s trial, had commented while releasing him: “There’s no question that the period he’s been in custody in this country has been under unusually harsh conditions.”
In May 2003, Azmath finally returned home. Here he was again questioned by various authorities but it wasn’t difficult for him to handle it after the previous experiences, he says.
Mohammed Azmath
Now, Azmath lives with his three children, wife and parents in Shahganj. Keeping a low profile, he now handles his father’s auto parts business in old city area. Gul Mohammed is working in the Gulf. Although it seems to be, but life is never been normal for Azmath: “I try my best to be normal, but where ever I go, people still point towards me as the World Trade Centre guy. I have been branded for my entire life.”
Asked if he is willing to visit the US again, Azmath goes into deep silence. After a while, he says: “At that time, they committed mistakes. They went emotional way rather than in a professional manner. (But) I really commend their judicial system.”
Today, Azmath says he has no bitterness against America but want its government to pay for its blunders. With the help of Center for Constitutional Rights, Azmath, along with many other victims like him, have filed a class law suit against the US government demanding compensation for wrongfully branding them as terrorists.
Azmath feels delighted that the US government has finally acknowledged its agencies’ wrong-doings in senate official report: “Truth has finally come out.” His one decade of wonderful experience in America as a land of opportunities was overshadowed by the year of torture he suffered. Now after the report, Azmath says, he expects at least an apology from the US government.