What Baltimore police discovered in a Northwest Baltimore apartment during a routine arrest Sept. 10 made them wonder: Had they stumbled onto a secret al-Qaida cell?
Police Commissioner Edward T. Norris thought it quite possible and said so on television. FBI counterterrorism agents rushed in to assess what police had found on the eve of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks:
At least six young, male Muslim immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Morocco, sharing a sparsely furnished apartment. A computer with links to Web sites of flight schools and local airports. Equipment apparently used to make false documents. Photographs of Union Station in Washington and Times Square in New York. Writings in Arabic and English mentioning jihad.
With America on edge, the story made national news. Immigration agents detained five of the men on visa violations. FBI affidavits describing the suspicious evidence persuaded judges to keep four men in jail, awaiting deportation.
But two months later, the terrorism investigation appears to have fizzled. Based on court testimony and interviews, the men appear to be exactly what they claimed: immigrants hustling at Afghan-owned New York Fried Chicken restaurants to make enough money to survive and send a little to family overseas.
Their only crime appears to be overstaying their visas.
"We're not the people they think we are," says Shamsudin Mohammed, 26, a Somali who has been incarcerated since his arrest Sept. 10. "This is the place we are eating and finding our freedom. We'll be the first to protect this country."
It is hard to be sure what the FBI learned because neither the FBI nor the U.S. attorney's office will comment.
But Mohammed, a skinny, smiling man in an orange jumpsuit interviewed through a glass screen at the York County Detention Center in Pennsylvania, says FBI agents last questioned him a month ago. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials say they believe the case to be a routine visa matter.
The rise and fall of the New York Fried Chicken case is a compelling study in the ways terrorism has changed America.
It shows the challenge to investigators as they patrol for al-Qaida cells among millions of immigrants, for whom language and cultural barriers, evasive answers, aliases and fake documents are commonplace.
For agents who ordinarily hunt for perpetrators of crimes already committed, the new and unfamiliar task is to figure out who might be plotting an attack.
FBI agents, criticized for "failing to connect the dots" before the Sept. 11 attacks, now err on the side of caution, pursuing even the slightest hint of terrorist ties. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has declared prevention of attacks to be the bureau's top priority.
But the case also reveals the anguish of Muslim immigrants who feel their lives shadowed by suspicion. Their fears are confirmed when they see other immigrants held up publicly as potential mass murderers, jailed for months - and then released or deported with no official acknowledgment that they are innocent of terrorism.
'Very frustrating'
"It's very frustrating for the Muslim community," says Abid Husain, director of the Islamic Center of Baltimore. "There's a fear that anybody can be picked up at any time."
The fear taints aspects of American life that drew the immigrants here in the first place.
"The best part of this country was everybody was innocent until proven guilty," says Dr. Hasan Jalisi, a physician and president of Muslim Community Support Services, a Baltimore-based advocacy group formed last year. "But for Muslims that no longer seems to be the case."
At the root of the tensions is the fact that the Sept. 11 hijackers lived for months in the United States undetected by law enforcement before launching their murderous plot.
Since then, investigators have uncovered "sleeper cells" of al-Qaida sympathizers in the United States, some of whom trained in terrorist camps abroad. In August, six men from Detroit and Seattle were accused of terrorism. In September, six men of Yemeni origin living near Buffalo, N.Y., were charged with providing material support to al-Qaida.
But of hundreds of Muslims detained over the past year, only a tiny fraction has been linked to terrorist groups. The Sept. 10 detentions in a quiet neighborhood off Park Heights Avenue typify the false alarms occurring across the country.
Baltimore police, who went to Labyrinth Road to arrest Moroccan immigrant Abderrahim Houti for threatening a woman with arson, found seven other "individuals of Middle Eastern descent" on the premises.
When some of the men could not produce identification, officers notified the FBI and INS, which took five of the men into custody for visa violations.
They all worked at a New York Fried Chicken on Park Heights Avenue or at other Afghan-owned chicken outlets in Baltimore, Washington and Delaware.
Detainee Khoshal Nasery, 24, for instance, was born in Kabul, raised in Pakistan and moved as a teen-ager to Canada, where he became a cricket standout. He moved to Baltimore two years ago to join his school pal, Reza Zazai, now also a detainee, who was working at the Park Heights restaurant and hoped to open his own place.
"I'm a cook," Nasery said in court. "I can work anywhere."
He kept his living expenses low and sent much of his pay to his mother in Pakistan, who suffers from depression.
The Afghan-chicken niche in the immigrant economy is based not on culinary tradition but historical accident.
A few Afghan-owned chicken joints opened in New York in the 1980s, and new immigrants followed their example. Today scores of outlets called New York Fried Chicken, Kennedy Fried Chicken, Super Kennedy Fried Chicken and other names are run by Afghan natives, mostly Pashtuns who fled during the Soviet war or the chaos that followed.
The shops often locate in poor, urban neighborhoods. As in other industries, immigrant workers often stay beyond the time limits on their visas. If they're caught, they are commonly released on bond, given a hearing and then either leave voluntarily or are deported.
Ehrlich weighs in
This case took that course until the FBI flagged it for possible terrorist links, with the vocal public support of Norris and Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who were upset when two of the detainees were released on $5,000 bail.
Given the alleged document forgery and other suspicious finds, Ehrlich, then in the midst of his successful campaign for governor, wrote to INS District Director Louis D. Crocetti Jr.: "I do not understand why INS did not consider these actions to be 'engaging in terrorist activity'" under the USA Patriot Act.
Crocetti ordered the rearrest of the men the day he got the letter, but not because of Ehrlich's demand, he says. "The letter was received after I'd already made my decision based on information received from the FBI," he says.
The appearance of political intervention did raise eyebrows in Canada, however, because two of the men, Zazai and Unsir Hafeez, are Canadian citizens and Nasery is a "landed immigrant" on his way to citizenship.
"There are some, let's say, non-legal elements to this situation," Canadian Foreign Affairs spokesman Reynald Doiron said of Ehrlich's involvement.
Norris, in addition to speaking to the media about his suspicions of terrorism, described the case in testimony to Congress. He mocked the initial willingness of the INS to permit the men to go free on bail.
"I mean, if they're waiting for a notarized plan with a list of terrorists, it's going to be a long wait," the police commissioner said. He said the Labyrinth Road detainees were "chillingly, eerily similar" to a terrorist cell he once encountered as a police officer in New York City.
Men held in jail
Immigration judges kept the men in jail. They based their decisions on FBI affidavits asking for time to complete the terrorism investigation.
The bureau won't say what it found. But it appears that none of the initial suspicions panned out. According to court filings and interviews:
Contrary to initial police impressions, the apartment contained neither forgery equipment nor false documents, says Crocetti.
The flight school and airport computer links were created by Ahmad Shah Malgarai, a Canadian and the brother of detainee Zazai. In an affidavit, Malgarai said he took a single, $49 flying lesson in Delaware in late 2000 or early 2001. Malgarai, who also has used the last name Khattab, said he used the computer more recently to research an article on the challenge facing Muslims who want to learn to fly since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The alleged "jihad writings" were verses from the Quran or other religious texts, some written by hand in a prayer notebook, according to lawyers for the detainees. Jihad, they note, is Arabic for "struggle" and often refers not to "holy war" but to the internal struggle of a person to resist bad habits and do the right thing.
"Anything the police don't understand can be called 'jihad material,'" says Jalisi, of Muslim Community Support Services.
Rather than surveillance photographs of terrorist targets, the pictures in the apartment turned out to be tourist snapshots or postcards, according to a government source.
The system worked
Crocetti, the INS district director, says he believes the system has worked reasonably well in the Labyrinth Road case. The 2,000 INS agents nationwide cannot keep constant track of the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants in the country, so they depend on random encounters like that on Sept. 10 to find violators, he says.
Still, while not passing judgment on Baltimore police or the FBI, Crocetti says investigators should not overreact in their hunt for terrorists. "Just because a person looks foreign doesn't mean they're not in the country legally, let alone that they have anything to do with terrorism," he says.
His agency is launching a training program for local police departments on immigration matters, Crocetti says.
Meanwhile, the Baltimore detentions have generated some negative publicity in Canada. Two weeks ago, in response to new U.S. immigration policies, the Canadian government warned Canadians born in five Muslim countries to think carefully before traveling to the United States.
Hard feelings
In Baltimore's Muslim immigrant community, the case has left bruised feelings. The detentions coincided with an Abell Foundation study, which concluded that Baltimore will rebound only if it can attract far larger numbers of immigrants.
Proprietors of the city's dozen New York Fried Chicken outlets say business is down.
"People saw the publicity and stopped coming," says Ashuqullah Ahmadi, 35, who owns a New York Fried Chicken outlet on West North Avenue. "You hear people say, 'Here come the bin Laden people.'"
The Afghan-born Ahmadi, who emigrated 20 years ago, says the splashy handling of such cases scares off the very people who would be most likely to know of immigrants with terrorist ties: fellow immigrants.
"If there really is a terrorist, you'll find out from the people around them," Ahmadi says. "To make so much publicity just embarrasses everyone."
Seeking balance
Sameer M. Ashar, a University of Maryland law professor who represents Nasery, says he's disturbed by several aspects of the case: the appearance of political pressure, ethnic and religious profiling, and Justice Department secrecy.
As co-director of the law school's civil rights clinic, he says, he fears Attorney General John Ashcroft is "trying to create a sense of security by warehousing a large number of Middle Eastern men."
Still, Ashar says, he was just 10 blocks from the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attacks, and he appreciates the danger posed by al-Qaida.
"As a country, we're trying to work out a rational way for the legal system to deal with the threat of terrorism," Ashar says. "I don't think we've found it yet."