Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan (also known as Syed Gul Mohamed Shah) are two Indian men who were wrongly accused of involvement in the September 11 terrorist attacks. [1] [2]
One day after the September 11th attacks, the men were detained in Texas for possible immigration violations. Their apartment in Jersey City was searched the following weekend. According to The Washington Post , writing one week after the attacks, "Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, 47, and Ayub Ali Khan, 51, both from India, were taken into custody Wednesday on an Amtrak train in Texas, carrying $5,000 in cash, hair dye and box cutter knives -- weapons said to have been used by the hijackers." [3] The subjects were profiled as potential drug smugglers because they purchased train tickets with cash immediately before departure, and appeared nervous when questioned. [4]
As of October 25, 2001, the men were being held in New York as material witnesses. [5] Investigators said they had offered Azmath, Khan, Zacarias Moussaoui and Nabil al-Marabh "the prospect of reduced sentences, money, jobs and new identities within the US" if they assisted investigation into the attacks, while threatening to inject them with a "truth serum", identified as sodium pentothal, or to transfer them to countries with more brutal interrogation techniques. [6] (see also torture by proxy, extraordinary rendition) The four men were cited by a number of media pundits raising discussion of whether torture should be practiced within the United States, and whether it would be effective. [7] [8]
In December 2001, The New York Times reported that 'three months of intensive investigation' had failed to link the men with the attack. The men's circumstance appeared to be coincidence - they had lost their employment managing news stands in Newark, and were relocating to Texas to open or work at a fruit stand. They had used box cutters to open bundles of newspapers. After their flight to San Antonio was stopped in St. Louis after the attacks, they boarded a train to complete the trip, which was stopped for a "routine drug search". [2]
Though cleared of involvement in the attacks, prosecutors charged them with an unrelated case of "fraud involving several hundred thousand dollars of unpaid credit card charges." [2] The men made a plea bargain, as arguing for their innocence would have left them in jail much longer than confessing their guilt. [9] They had agreed afterward to be deported for immigration violations. [2]
Both men alleged ill-treatment in custody, the first 12 months of which they spent in solitary confinement. According to Azmath, "I was made to stand in freezing temperatures in the open for four to five hours a day to force me to confess to a crime I had not committed." According to Khan's lawyer, each time he was brought to court he was thrown, while shackled, against a wall. After reaching India they filed suit against the United States. [9]
Following their deportation, both men were charged in India with passport violations. [9] According to the Times of India , the men were accused of obtaining fake passports from a corrupt passport agent, and Khan's true name was Gul Mohammed Shah, and Azmath had listed his age as 50 rather than 30. The Times reported that Azmath's wife, Tasleem Murad, had told them that he was not the first person to misstate his age to obtain a visa and "He did not have any evil intentions and he has paid for it already." [10] An additional issue was that Azmath's wife, being Pakistani, did not have Indian citizenship. [9]
The 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting [11] was awarded to a September 29 article in The Washington Post by Dan Eggen and Bob Woodward, which mentioned the detention of Khan and Azmath and reported that an anonymous source said that "Both men had flight training". [12]
After all of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. government responded with immediate action, and long-term action, including investigations, legislative changes, military action and restoration projects. Investigations into the motivations and execution of the attacks led to the declaration of War on Terrorism that led to ongoing military engagements in Afghanistan and subsequently Iraq. Clean-up and restoration efforts led to the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, and federal grants supported the development of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
Ramzi Mohammed Abdullah bin al-Shibh is a Yemeni citizen currently being held by the U.S. as an enemy combatant detainee at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He is accused of being a "key facilitator for the September 11 attacks" in 2001 in the United States. He is also reported to be the "20th hijacker" as one of the pilots, but was unable to enter the U.S.
Riduan Isamuddin also transliterated as Riduan Isamudin, Riduan Isomuddin, and Riduan Isomudin, better known by the nom de guerreHambali, is the former military leader of the Indonesian terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which is linked with al-Qaeda. He is now in American custody in the United States's Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. He is currently awaiting trial in a military commission.
In American criminal law, a material witness is a person with information alleged to be material concerning a criminal proceeding. The authority to detain material witnesses dates to the First Judiciary Act of 1789, but the Bail Reform Act of 1984 most recently amended the text of the statute, and it is now codified at 18 U.S.C. § 3144. The most recent version allows material witnesses to be held to ensure the giving of their testimony in criminal proceedings or to a grand jury.
Mohammed Mani Ahmad al-Qahtani is a Saudi citizen who was detained as an al-Qaeda operative for 20 years in the United States's Guantanamo Bay detention camps in Cuba. Qahtani allegedly tried to enter the United States to take part in the September 11 attacks as the 20th hijacker and was due to be onboard United Airlines Flight 93 along with the four other hijackers. He was refused entry due to suspicions that he was trying to illegally immigrate. He was later captured in Afghanistan in the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a Mauritanian citizen who was detained at Guantánamo Bay detention camp without charge from 2002 until his release on October 17, 2016.
Ammar Al-Baluchi is a Pakistani citizen in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Charges against him include "facilitating the 9/11 attackers, acting as a courier for Osama bin Laden and plotting to crash a plane packed with explosives into the U.S. consulate in Karachi."
Extraordinary rendition is a euphemism for state-sponsored forcible abduction in another jurisdiction and transfer to a third state. The phrase usually refers to a United States-led program used during the War on Terror, which had the purpose of circumventing the source country's laws on interrogation, detention, extradition and/or torture. Extraordinary rendition is a type of extraterritorial abduction, but not all extraterritorial abductions include transfer to a third country.
Ghost detainee is a term used in the executive branch of the United States government to designate a person held in a detention center, whose identity has been hidden by keeping them unregistered and therefore anonymous. Such uses arose as the Bush administration initiated the War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 in the United States. As documented in the 2004 Taguba Report, it was used in the same manner by United States officials and contractors of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003–2004.
The Salt Pit and Cobalt were the code names of an isolated clandestine CIA black site prison and interrogation center outside Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. It was located north of Kabul and was the location of a brick factory prior to the Afghanistan War. The CIA adapted it for extrajudicial detention.
Dilawar, also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who was tortured to death by US Army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.
Khaled El-Masri is a German and Lebanese citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and subjected to other cruel forms of inhumane and degrading treatment and torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him. He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, whom the CIA captured from 2001 to 2005, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks.
Mohammed Saghir(also transliterated Mohammed Sanghir) is an elderly Pakistani who was held by the U.S. military in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 143. Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts estimate he was born in 1952, in Khohestan, Pakistan.
Majid Shoukat Khan is a Pakistani who was the only known legal resident of the United States held in the Guantanamo Bay Detainment Camp. He was detained after returning to his native Pakistan to visit his wife and was captured by Pakistani authorities, who handed him over to the CIA. In 2012, Khan pled guilty to conspiracy and the murder of 11 innocent civilians in the 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta, Indonesia, and for the attempted assassination of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.
United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, et al. is the trial of five alleged Al-Qaeda members for aiding the September 11, 2001 attacks. Charges were announced by Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann on February 11, 2008 at a press conference hosted by the Pentagon. The men charged are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, and Mustafa Ahmad al Hawsawi.
This page lists trials related to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States Government began detaining people who fit the profile of the suspected hijackers: mostly male, Arabic, or Muslim noncitizens. According to Justice Berman, they had arrested 1,182 people as of November 5, 2001. By late November 2001, more than 1,200 people had been detained. A document made and published by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) contained information about the detainees.
James Elmer Mitchell is an American psychologist and former member of the United States Air Force. From 2002, after his retirement from the military, to 2009, his company Mitchell Jessen and Associates received $81 million on contract from the CIA to carry out the interrogation of detainees, referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" that resulted in little credible information. Techniques implemented could be considered as war crimes.
The D.C. Five is a group of Muslim Americans from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., with suspected ties to terrorism. The five men were detained on December 9, 2009, during a police raid in Pakistan on a house with links to a militant group. In part of an increasing trend in homegrown terrorism, they were in their late teens or early twenties.
The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program is a report compiled by the bipartisan United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s Detention and Interrogation Program and its use of torture during interrogation in U.S. government communiqués on detainees in CIA custody. The report covers CIA activities before, during, and after the "War on Terror". The initial report was approved on December 13, 2012, by a vote of 9–6, with seven Democrats, one Independent, and one Republican voting in favor of the report and six Republicans voting in opposition.