2 Indians Survived 9/11, Then American Justice System Became Their Nightmare

The day after 9/11, while the world was still watching towers of smoke rise over Manhattan on television screens, two Indian men were pulled off an Amtrak train in Texas. Within hours, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, whose real name was later established as Syed Gul Mohammed Shah, found themselves at the centre of the largest terror investigation in American history, and at the mercy of a legal system that, in the weeks that followed, would rewrite its own rules faster than almost any other moment.

Arrest That Started It All

Azmath, 47, and Khan, 51, were arrested on September 12, 2001 near Fort Worth, Texas (a United Nations filing later cited September 13). According to a Fort Worth Police Department report, officers questioning the two men noted they seemed unusually nervous. A search turned up $5,500 in cash, two flat box-cutter type knives, and a supply of hair dye. Azmath was also carrying several photocopies of his own passport, some showing him clean-shaven, others with a full beard.

Read: Before 9/11, India Was On Osama Bin Laden's Hit List, CIA Documents Reveal

The two men had been roommates in Jersey City, working together managing newsstands. On the morning of September 11, they had been on a flight out of Newark bound for San Antonio. When the Federal Aviation Administration grounded every commercial flight in the country that day, their plane was diverted to St Louis, Missouri. With no flights running, they booked an Amtrak train instead to finish the journey. It was during a routine drug search on that train, two days later, that officers pulled them off.

The police report noted that a trash bag the men were carrying held what officers called "paraphernalia that could assist in the altering of the appearance of the subjects." There were also wire transfer receipts, empty cash envelopes marked with dates, and letters written in Arabic. Three days after the arrest, FBI agents raided the $480-a-month apartment the two men shared in Jersey City, in what an FBI spokeswoman at the time called "a top-to-bottom sweep."

To investigators working a case with no precedent and a country demanding answers, two Indian men carrying box cutters and hair dye looked like a lead.

Country Rewriting Its Own Laws

What happened to Azmath and Khan over the following fourteen months cannot be separated from what was happening in Washington at the same time. On October 26, 2001, just six weeks after their arrest, US President George W Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act into law. Among its many provisions, the Act expanded the government's power to detain non-citizens and broadened the use of an old, rarely invoked law, the material witness statute, which had originally been designed to hold people only briefly, to secure testimony they might otherwise flee to avoid giving.

After 9/11, the Department of Justice began using that same statute very differently. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, officials used it in scores of cases to hold mostly Arab and Muslim men indefinitely, many of whom, despite being arrested only as "witnesses," were never actually brought before a court to testify. Azmath and Khan were two of them. They were held not as suspects charged with any crime, but as material witnesses, a legal category that gave the government wide latitude to keep them locked up while investigators tried to determine whether they knew anything useful.

They were sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, one of two facilities that would later come under direct scrutiny from the Justice Department's own watchdog.

Read: What We Remember When We Remember 9/11

In June 2003, the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General published a 198-page review, mandated under its responsibilities tied to the PATRIOT Act, examining how post-9/11 detainees were treated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and at Passaic County Jail in New Jersey. A follow-up supplemental report in December 2003 went further, documenting in granular detail what investigators had found at the Brooklyn facility.

That report concluded that approximately sixteen to twenty staff members, a significant share of the officers who had regular contact with detainees, had violated Bureau of Prisons policy by physically or verbally abusing some of the men in custody. Investigators documented detainees being slammed, bounced, and rammed against walls, having their arms, hands, wrists, and fingers bent, and being subjected to rough handling with restraints. The Inspector General's office also found that the facility had been unlawfully audiotaping detainees' meetings with their own lawyers.

Around the same time, senators were raising alarm from the other end of the process. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont introduced legislation, S. 1739, to add procedural safeguards to the material witness statute. A separate push, folded into a proposed PATRIOT Act reauthorisation bill, would have required periodic Congressional review of exactly how the material witness power was being used. That provision was dropped before the bill ever reached the House floor, in the face of opposition from the Bush administration.

The Senate Judiciary Committee also held a hearing l titled "America after 9/11: Freedom Preserved or Freedom Lost?"

Held Without Charge, For Reasons Never Fully Explained

While all this was unfolding in Washington, Azmath and Khan remained in solitary confinement, held on presumption and suspicion rather than any evidence tying them to the attacks. Investigators reportedly offered them, along with two other detainees, "the prospect of reduced sentences, money, jobs and new identities within the US" if they cooperated, while also raising the possibility of injecting them with sodium pentothal, a so-called truth serum, or transferring them to countries known for harsher interrogation methods.

Read: 25 Years After 9/11: Tracing The Rise And Fall Of al Qaeda

Azmath later described his confinement in an interview with BBC, "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." Khan's lawyer said that every time his client was brought to court, shackled, he was thrown against a wall.

Thousands of miles away in India, Khan's elderly mother, who suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes, could not get a single message through to her son. According to a later United Nations filing, the family tried repeatedly to reach the US Secretary of State and Secretary of Defence to find out whether Khan and Azmath were even facing formal proceedings, and to request visas so they could visit. They received no response. Both men had been the sole earners for their families back home. For over a year, that income simply stopped.

A Verdict, Finally

By December 2001, three months of investigation had failed to establish any link between the two men and the attacks, The New York Times reported. Their movements, it turned out, had a far less suspicious explanation: they had lost their newsstand jobs in Newark and were relocating to Texas to open a fruit stand. The box cutters had been used only to open bundles of newspapers.

Opinion: 9/11, And The Price Of Fighting Terror For A Quarter Century

Despite being cleared of any terrorism connection, prosecutors then charged Azmath and Khan in an unrelated matter involving several hundred thousand dollars in unpaid credit card charges. Rather than fight the charge and risk staying in custody far longer, the two men took a plea bargain and agreed to be deported.

It was left to an international body, not an American court, to formally rule on what had happened to them. In December 2002, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a formal opinion on their case. It found that by that point, Khan and Azmath had been held for more than fourteen months, largely in solitary confinement, without ever being officially charged, without any meaningful contact with their families, and without a single court ever ruling on whether their detention was lawful in the first place. The Working Group concluded this amounted to a clear violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which the United States has ratified, and formally called on the US government to correct it.

What Happened To Their Case

Following their deportation, Azmath and Khan pursued legal action against the US government over their treatment, according to a BBC report from 2003. But unlike Turkmen v Ashcroft, a related class-action case brought by other men detained in the same period at the same facility, which dragged through the American court system for two decades before finally settling in 2022, no public record shows how, or whether, Azmath and Khan's own claim against the United States was ever resolved. There is no reported settlement, no dismissal on record, no final judgment. The trail, as far as public documentation goes, simply goes cold once the two men left American soil.

For a case that drew the attention of the United Nations, that silence is its own kind of answer.

Returning to India did not bring the men peace either. Authorities there separately charged both with passport violations, alleging Khan had obtained his passport from a corrupt agent under a false identity, and that Azmath had misstated his age on his own documents.

NDTV made efforts to reach Azmath and Khan for this story, but could only establish that twenty-five years on, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan live a reclusive life in Hyderabad. Until Covid, they used to live in Malakpet.