Ties to hijacker suspected for 2 arrested in FW

Witness accounts make officials 'completely suspicious'

10/27/2001

By TODD BENSMAN / The Dallas Morning News

Federal authorities tentatively have linked two men arrested on an Amtrak train in Fort Worth to one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, two federal law enforcement officials say.

The FBI has obtained credible witness accounts that the two men in custody, identified as Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, were seen with one hijacker at a mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y., and also at a nearby convenience store before last month's attack.

"They're getting tied in that way," one law enforcement official said. "We're starting to get them linked to one of the hijackers."

No further details about the investigation of the two men were available Friday, including the name of the mosque and the hijaker with whom they were believed to have been seen.

One federal official cautioned that much more work was needed but that the sightings had helped focus the FBI's investigation of the pair and on the mostly Arab neighborhood in Brooklyn where the men may have visited.

Referring to the witness accounts of the sightings, the official said: "There is enough there to make us completely suspicious."

Of the 977 people who had been arrested in connection with the terrorism inquiry as of midday Friday, the Fort Worth pair had emerged among the handful of cases considered most intriguing by investigators. They have been held on material-witness warrants since members of a federal drug task force found the men Sept. 12 on a San Antonio-bound train carrying cash, hair dye, box cutters, and more than $5,000 in cash.

When hijacked jets slammed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, the two men were on a TWA flight from Newark, N.J., to San Antonio that was grounded in St. Louis when the nation's air traffic was halted.

A federal law officer said the FBI, after examining passenger lists, said it has found no other suspicious people on that flight. That officer and others involved in the case spoke on the condition that they would not be named.

The potential link to one of the hijackers has added to earlier suspicions about the two men. Friday, for instance, a law enforcement official confirmed initial reports that both men had shaved all of their body hair – an act prescribed in operational instructions left behind by some of the hijackers.

Fort Worth Police Department records that were made public this week reveal that a background check "found that both names were on record with the DEA as being involved in narcotic distribution." But Karl Colder, resident agent in charge of the Fort Worth office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, said the names on the list turned out not to be those of the two men.

While they were questioned by authorities on the train, both men acted nervous, the report said. Mr. Azmath's carotid artery pulsed rapidly, his hands trembled, and sweat beaded his brow, according to the report.

Mr. Khan also trembled when questioned. He breathed rapidly, avoided eye contact with an officer, and "continually looked down at his feet," the documents say.

Mr. Azmath told officers that he "did not have anything to do with what happened in New York" and that he and Mr. Khan were traveling together and planned to spend about a month with a friend in San Antonio.

Their possessions added to the intrigue, officials have said.

So has the fact that the men, natives of India, wired $64,000 to their families in Hyderabad in 1999 despite holding low-paying jobs as curbside magazine salesmen in Newark. Indian police officials have accused both men of fraudulently changing their names to obtain false passports.

The Brooklyn neighborhood under scrutiny is where convicted terrorist Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman led prayers in local mosques.

The blind Egyptian cleric has been in jail since several months after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and he is serving life in prison without parole for inspiring his followers to blow up New York landmarks. A number of the cleric's followers also were convicted of plotting terrorist acts and were linked to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

The pair in custody lived in a Jersey City, N.J., apartment. Some anthrax-laced letters have been postmarked Trenton, N.J..

Experts have swabbed some of the belongings removed by agents on Sept. 15 during their search of the Jersey City apartment shared by Mr. Khan and Mr. Azmath. Test results are pending, FBI Agent Sandra Carroll in Newark said Friday.

"Depending on the results, then we will either proceed further with it or will move on," she said. "At this point, we have no evidence nor do we suspect that that apartment or these individuals are connected to the anthrax cases." Media reports to the contrary, the FBI has not tested the apartment, she said.

There also have been no anthrax tests of the men, their travel possessions, or 1995 magazines with cover articles on biological and chemical warfare found at the apartment, she said.

The federal law enforcement officials said FBI agents found the San Antonio man whom the two said they were going to visit. The man told FBI agents that he had planned to hire the pair. The bureau is satisfied the San Antonio man was being truthful and does not seek him for further questioning, the official said.

Staff writers Michelle Mittelstadt, Dan Malone, and David McLemore contributed to this report.