Days after Hudson County became a refuge for people fleeing the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, it began serving as a focal point in unraveling the nature of those attacks.
The FBI has been combing neighborhoods in Jersey City – which harbored terrorists involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center – and other Hudson County towns in order to interview suspects. In one case, a moving company in the Shades section of Weehawken was raided.
The most activity seemed to center on Jersey City a week ago Saturday morning, when the FBI raided a four-story apartment building at 6 Tonnelle Ave. Authorities interrogated all the tenants and took away a half dozen people for further questioning, witnesses said.
According to FBI spokesperson Sandra Carroll, one man was detained on immigration issues that stemmed from a visa that had expired at the beginning of this month.
According to reports, FBI agents investigated the building after learning that two men on an Amtrak train detained in Fort Worth, Texas, for allegedly carrying box cutters and thousands of dollars in cash, shared an apartment at the Jersey City address.
According to officials, before boarding the train, the two men, Ayub Ali Kahn and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, had been on a plane destined for San-Antonio from Newark. However, it was diverted to St. Louis, Missouri when the FAA closed down all air space in light of the attacks.
The terrorists on the hijacked planes had reportedly used box cutters as a weapon in their plot.
As for the man who was detained from the building on immigration issues, Abdul-Salam Achou, 37, is a delivery driver for a bakery. He’s still being held in a Kearny jail by Immigration Naturalization Services because his visa expired, Carroll said.
Achou’s wife, Sousan, told the Reporter last week that she has not seen in her husband since he was taken away.
The couple, who lives next door to Kahn and Azmath, moved to the country nine months ago. Mrs. Achou, who has two children and is eight months pregnant, said that Kahn and Azmath were living in the building before she arrived. She also said that her communication with them was limited to greeting each other in the hallway.
Although the FBI has claimed that only one resident of the building was being detained, Achou said that her neighbor’s husband was being detained on immigration violations as well. Achou has spoken to her husband on the phone once and said he told her, while crying, "I am innocent."
The owner of the building told a local newspaper that Kahn and Azmath had lived there for approximately seven years. The Reporter made several attempts to speak to the owner, but could not reach him for comment.
Residents in the area said they feel that they are under close scrutiny by the police now. Jamal Johnson, 23, lives on Tonnelle Avenue not too far from the apartment building that was raided. "Nobody trusts each other," Johnson said. "Everybody is afraid."
For the FBI, the streets of Jersey City are familiar territory after unraveling the plot of a former terrorist attack in 1993. The building in Tonnelle Avenue is in the same neighborhood as the mosque on 2824 Kennedy Boulevard, where the spiritual ringleader Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, formerly preached.
FBI raids Weehawken company
Residents of Weehawken’s relatively quite and remote Shades area were started by an FBI presence a week ago Thursday when agents conducted a raid on a Weehawken moving company, apparently as part of the investigation to the World Trade Center terrorist tragedy.
According to Weehawken public safety director Jeff Welz, the FBI acted on a tip and raided the offices of the Urban Moving Systems Company on 18th Street and Hackensack Plank Road, across the street from St. Lawrence Church, confiscating boxes of documents and several computers in the process.
"As orders of the FBI, we are not at liberty of discussing the details of the raid," Welz said. "The Weehawken police department has given full, 100 percent cooperation with the FBI on the matter."
Welz was asked if the residents called with concerns about the raid.
"The neighbors are obviously curious and quizzical," Welz said. "It’s not every day that you have a raid of that magnitude, with the FBI in your neighborhood. I think the neighbors were more concerned as what was really going on."
According to FBI spokesperson and special agent Sandra Carroll, the raid resulted from a tip that five Middle Eastern-looking men were spotted outside a van parked on Route 3 in Secaucus after the planes hit the World Trade Center, and that the men were jumping and cheering while looking at the debacle across the Hudson. FBI officials traced the van to Urban Moving in Weehawken and then raided the premises, she said. However, there is no indication as to whether the five men actually were affiliated with Urban Moving in any way. It has also not been proven that the men were cheering.
"We are pursuing a number of investigative leads, trying to gain as much information as we can about the hijackers and any of their associates," Carroll said.
Carroll hinted that the investigation did not turn up links to the terrorists, but might involve a probe of more minor infractions.
"It’s now considered a criminal investigation not related to the attack," Carroll stated.
The company’s owner, Dominik Suter of Fair Lawn, did not return phone calls by press time.
No criminal charges have been filed against Suter or the five men who were apparently in the van. But the five men have been turned over to Immigration and Naturalization authorities, because their immigration status appeared to be out of sequence, Carroll said.
An anonymous neighbor who resides in the Shades said that she applied for a job with Urban Moving three weeks ago and that the owners and operators were of Slavic-European descent and not Middle Eastern. Many of the detained terrorists have been of Middle Eastern descent.
"Right now, we have no concerns with public safety at the site," Welz said. "It’s a very quiet and remote area with not a lot of activity, so this stood out."
Apparently, Weehawken police had been sent previously to inspect Urban Moving because of complaints of dumping trash in the adjacent St. Lawrence Church parking lot. The state’s Department of Consumer Affairs had nine complaints registered against Urban Moving for taking money from clients, then not completing the work they were paid to do, according to Welz.