14Jan04-Paying for Post-9/11 Paranoia
Those swept up locally by anxious law enforcement agencies get on with life.
By Jeff Prince and Dan Malone
Pavel Lachko and Boris Avdeev: unlikely terrorist suspects.
A wrist slap. That's the outcome of the Sept. 6 arrest of two Russian exchange students by the Arlington Police Department, an investigation by police and a Homeland Security federal agent, a county prosecutor's decision to seek charges, three months of delayed court hearings, and, finally, a judge's verdict last week.
On Jan. 8, County Criminal Court Judge Phil Sorrells dismissed the charges of criminal trespassing against Pavel Lachko and Boris Avdeev, both 22-year-old graduate students who attend the University of Texas at Arlington. The pair was facing a maximum penalty of six months in jail and up to $2,000 in fines, along with a slew of potential problems with immigration officials. The judge dismissed the charges after hearing that the students had written an apology and put in 40 hours of community service. The two thereby escaped the fates of other foreigners who have endured far-reaching consequences of running afoul of the American justice system post-9/11.
In an era of terrorist bombings, jihad, global mistrust, and general paranoia about foreigners with accents, police chose to seek charges against the students, even after an investigation showed they were legitimate guests of the country and were not even, as one cop referred to them at the arrest scene, "Palestinians."
Their crime? Lachko and Avdeev rode bicycles onto a restricted police parking lot to ask for directions to a rock-climbing gym. They quickly found themselves jailed by wary cops just days before the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist bombings. Both students speak with heavy accents and neither carried identification.
The district attorney's office filed charges even after the students' identification and legal status were verified. The judge's decision to dismiss doesn't mean that prosecutors erred in taking them to court, said Assistant D.A. David Montague. "When you're talking about misdemeanor offenses, what we think is a just resolution involves all kinds of diversionary efforts," he said. "Many of these cases result in eventual dismissal. It doesn't mean the D.A. has lost; it means we are looking for creative ways to handle these issues."
Sometimes, a slap on the wrist is all that's needed to provide justice. "Obviously that was the case here," he said.
The Russian students were lucky. They found a support system of residents and activists who rallied behind them, enlisted free legal representation, and helped to ensure that the students maintained a clean record. But locally and nationwide, others haven't been so lucky. Fear and worry about terrorists have prompted a wide variety of arrests, knee-jerk reactions, and nose-thumbing at the Constitution.
At least three other men who were arrested in Tarrant County on what turned out to be unfounded suspicions of terrorism spent months in U.S. jails before being tossed out of the country by U.S. immigration officials.
One day after 9/11, police pulled two Indian men from an Amtrak train that had stopped in Fort Worth. The pair was packing hair dye, box-cutters, and several thousand dollars in cash -- possessions that set off alarms in a nation still reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As events unfolded, neither Mohammed Azmath, 38, nor Syed Gul Mohammed Shah, 37, were implicated in any terror plot -- though both were subsequently convicted of unrelated credit card fraud and were deported after spending part of two years behind bars in the U.S.
Their attorneys have said the two men were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The men said being wrongly suspected of terrorism left indelible stains on their lives. Eight months after being deported, Azmath told The Times of India that "even now I am looked at with suspicion.''
"I never want to return to the U.S." Shah told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur after his return to India last year. "The land of opportunity destroyed my future."
Even more disturbing is the case of Anwar Al-Mirabi, a Saudi Arabian businessman who came to the U.S. for the first time in the mid-1990s and was living and raising a family in Arlington when he was arrested on Sept. 13, 2001. Al-Mirabi spent more than nine months in a succession of jails stretching from Denton to Chicago only to ultimately be accused of nothing more serious than a minor immigration violation.
In the days after 9/11, Al-Mirabi's neighbors at an Arlington apartment complex apparently telephoned authorities with suspicions -- unfounded, it turns out -- about the Saudi businessman. When federal investigators paid him a visit, they became extremely interested in his travels through Washington and New York near the time of the terror attacks, the time he spent in Afghanistan as a young man, and his interest in a flight simulation game.
He was held as a material witness -- though witness to what was never made public -- and taken repeatedly before a grand jury to testify (about what is also unclear). Ultimately, officials decided he would not be charged with any terror-related crime. The best anyone outside the government can tell, Al-Mirabi's travels and interests that looked suspicious were just unfortunate coincidences.
In a recent e-mail to Fort Worth Weekly, Al-Mirabi said a painful infection he developed while in jail in the U.S. has led to four surgeries since he was deported. But his memories of his last months in the U.S. also remain painful. "I feel bad for Americans,'' he said. "America has lost a lot of its human rights. America used to stand for justice and be an example for the rest of the world."
The difficulty in knowing what to make of such cases stems, in part, from the secrecy with which the Bush administration has shrouded the arrests, detention, and deportation of some 700 persons, mostly Muslims or Arabs, in the months following 9/11. The government says that releasing any information about them could aid other terrorists.
The Center for National Security Studies in Washington tried to force the government to release information about those in custody, but the U.S. Supreme Court this week refused to even consider whether the government acted improperly in withholding such information.
The way the law stands leaves little hope for shining any light into what has become a virtual American gulag.
"The Justice Department is keeping the names secret to cover up its misconduct -- holding people incommunicado and without charges,'' Kate Martin, director of the security studies center, said of the high court's decision. "The cover-up maintains the fiction that the government was going after terrorists when it instead was rounding up hundreds of Arabs and Muslims."
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