But in reality, their lives have been greatly altered, perhaps permanently.
On Sept. 11, just two and a half weeks earlier, the children’s father, Al-Badr Al-Hazmi–a fourth-year radiology resident at the University of Texas Health Science Center–was studying for his boards when he saw the news of the terrorist attacks on TV. “I cried,” says Al-Hazmi. “My eyes filled with tears. It was absolutely evil.” When he went to the mosque that day, as he did every day, Al-Hazmi prayed for the victims. It would be his last day of freedom for some time.
The next morning at 5 a.m., just as he was readying himself for his dawn prayer, Al-Hazmi heard a knock on his door and found FBI, immigration and customs agents with a warrant to search his house. “There were six men with guns,” he says. “They asked me if I knew Mohamed Atta, and I said that I’d never heard that name. They mentioned another name, Khalid-something, and I said I never heard that name.”
The agents searched his house for six hours and removed his home computer, medical textbooks and Islamic magazines. Al-Hazmi called Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company that had sponsored his residency since 1997 and asked them what to do. They said to videotape the search, but the FBI told Al-Hazmi that he couldn’t. At 10:30 a.m., another group of agents arrived. “I knew something was wrong,” said Al-Hazmi. Outside his house, they handcuffed him. “I said, ‘What is my guilt?’ And they said, ‘We’ll tell you in the office’.”
Al-Hazmi was put under “administrative arrest” and taken to the FBI office in San Antonio. There, agents questioned him about the whereabouts of his five brothers and three sisters. Around 4 p.m. that day, he was allowed to call a lawyer, and he telephoned his wife to let her know that he was all right. It was the last time that he would speak to her for 11 days.
That evening, Al-Hazmi was put in jail in nearby Comal County. Suffering from bronchitis, he asked for an antibiotic, but received only Tylenol. His eyeglasses, used to correct his severe nearsightedness, were confiscated and never returned. Two days later, he was transported to the Immigration and Naturalization Services building in San Antonio, where he was fingerprinted again and had his photographs taken. “I kept asking them to let me call my lawyer,” he says, “but they wouldn’t let me. ‘Maybe in one hour. Maybe at 4.’ The whole day went like this.”
Al-Hazmi still didn’t know why he was being held.
On Friday, Sept. 14, Al-Hazmi–his 5-foot-4, 110-pound body now in shackles–was driven to the airport. Hours later, he arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International, where dozens of U.S. Marshals stood on the runway with automatic rifles in their arms. “I knew things were getting worse,” he says. His hunch was correct. At the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, Al-Hazmi says he became a target for physical abuse. He says that FBI agents routinely kicked him in the small of his back, shouting at him, while asking him his name. (The FBI has said they have “no information of any such allegation.”)
On Tuesday, Sept. 19, six days after he was handcuffed and taken from his home, Al-Hazmi was officially informed of the allegations against him. They told him he shared the same family name of two of the hijackers, Salem Al-Hazmi and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, and they knew that in 1999, he had twice contacted Abdullah bin Laden, one of the family members of Osama bin Laden. His travel to Washington and Boston earlier this year was questioned, too, as was his planned trip to San Diego with his family on Sept. 22, which was booked and paid for through the Travelocity Web site, which some of the hijackers allegedly used, as well. Authorities wanted to know why there were two other men on the San Diego flight with the same surname.
Al-Hazmi, he told them, is a common name in Saudi Arabia. “It’s like John Smith in the U.S.,” he says. And Al-Hazmi says he had contacted Abdullah bin Laden in reference to his nonprofit World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which teaches people about Islam.
That Sunday night, he was questioned about every trip that he had taken while living in San Antonio for the last four years, which hotels he had stayed in and what airlines he had flown. His bank accounts were scrutinized and questioned.
After more hours of intense questioning, Al-Hazmi’s case was dismissed. Just before 5 p.m. on Sept. 24, he was released in New York, without his glasses, without his clothes, in blue jail pants and black top.
“I was happy to smell the fresh air and see the sun,” he says. Escorted by his attorney, Al-Hazmi ate a Milky Way candy bar, went to a nearby hotel and called his mother, his brothers and his wife, who, at the urging of the Saudi Embassy, had taken their children and moved temporarily out of their house.
Al-Hazmi arrived at home at 3 p.m. on Sept. 26, to dozens of friends and family, who poured sugary mint tea and passed around dates.
His son cried the entire time that he was gone, says his wife, and still doesn’t seem quite the same. His oldest daughter saw some of the dozens of reports on television. “She said, ‘You were in jail,’” says Al-Hazmi, his eyes filling with tears. “How can you explain to innocent kids what happened? I’m embarrassed, ashamed to explain,” he says. “It was painful for me and my family to lose my freedom for two weeks.”
In the 13 days that Al-Hazmi was held by federal authorities, his name and photograph was splashed all over newspapers and television. It was widely reported that he was connected to two men taken from a San Antonio-bound train with box cutters, hair dye and several thousand dollars in cash.
Newspapers also reported that he had an alias, Khalid al-Midar, and a passport to go along with it. He was frequently described as someone who was thought to have provided money and other support to the hijackers, in addition to having the same last name as two of the suspected suicide pilots.
Al-Hazmi may not stay for the rest of his residency, slated to end in June 2002, or to take his final board exam. Some people at University Hospital, where he works, don’t want him to come back. Despite his exoneration, he says, it might be risky. His mother is urging him to come home to Saudi Arabia, where he and his family would be safe. And he says he’s thinking seriously about it. These days, friends are pitching in to pay the $15 an hour fee for the security guard that sits in a truck in his driveway at night. But Al-Hazmi is even more afraid of the “three-letter agencies that can abuse the law for whatever reason that they want,” says his friend, Abdulla Mohammad. Either way, the price of staying in America may be too high.
