‘It Cannot Be,’ Grandmother of Suspect Says

Amnih Mohammed Odeh Salameh cried as perhaps only grandmothers can as she acknowledged Mohammed A. Salameh, the prime suspect in the World Trade Center bombing, as her grandson.

“This cannot be the work of our Mohammed Amin--he has always been a good boy, a polite boy, a loving boy, God be praised,” she said Sunday, sobbing softly and wiping away tears. “This (bombing) is not God’s work, and it cannot be our Mohammed’s work.”

But seven years have passed since Amnih Salameh last saw her grandson, now 25, and he is portrayed by investigators in New York as an Islamic fundamentalist who may have been carried into political violence by his strong religious beliefs.

“We are all Muslims, some better than others,” Amnih Salameh said. “We pray, we fast, we worship the one true god, Allah. . . .

“But fundamentalism--we don’t know that word, not in this family.”

Yet Amnih Salameh was crying, and had been crying since she first heard the news on Jordanian television Saturday evening that the Mohammed Salameh arrested last week in the trade center bombing was the oldest son of her daughter, Ayshah, who is now 45.

“Mohammed was always shy, a bit naive and too accepting as a person,” his grandmother said, tears filling her light brown eyes and rolling down her wrinkled cheeks. “Maybe someone gained control of him in America and turned his mind in another direction.”

At “something around 80 years,” the matriarch of a family of five children and grandchildren she said were “too many to count,” Amnih Salameh felt torn. “What is this about?” she asked.

Twisting first the silver bracelets on her left wrist and then the gold ones on her right, tightening her head scarf and then huddling in her gray-blue gown of rough wool, she praised her rarely seen grandson and defended the family against charges she could barely comprehend.

“What is this about?” she asked again. “Mohammed Amin was a good boy, the son of an army officer, a good Muslim, a comfort to his mother. . . . Why would he want to kill 40,000 or 50,000 people like the American officials say?”

Born in his grandparents’ home here on Sept. 1, 1967, Mohammed Salameh left Biddiya, a farming town of 8,000 Palestinians on the West Bank about 15 miles northwest of the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv, as an infant.

“He left in his mother’s arms, and he has never been back,” an uncle, Amer abu Bakr Salameh, an Arabic teacher at the local school, said. “That is the way it is with a lot of our people. They don’t want to live under Israeli occupation, they don’t want their children to grow up that way.”

Three months before Mohammed Salameh’s birth, Israel had captured the West Bank from Jordan during the 1967 Six-Day War, and his father, Amin Abdul-Rahmin Salameh, a warrant officer and pharmacist in the Jordanian army, had retreated with other soldiers across the Jordan River to the East Bank.

Ayshah Salameh, then only 20, joined her husband in Amman, the Jordanian capital, about three months after their son’s birth. Mohammed was the couple’s first child--and they had 11 more in the two decades that followed. With the father retired from the Jordanian army, the family now lives in Ajwani near Zarqa, Jordan’s second-largest city.

(Jordan considers all Palestinians born in the West Bank before and for many years after its capture by Israel to be Jordanian citizens, and therefore Salameh holds a passport declaring him to have been born in Jordan and to hold Jordanian nationality.)

“I only met Mohammed while visiting my sister’s family, and he seemed to be a very good boy, very nice, very polite,” Amer Salameh said. “He went to America, I know, to get more education and to find a job so that he could help his father financially with the younger children.

“That he would try to blow up the World Trade Center is very hard to believe. This is not the boy I met--he was loving, caring, a good son, a good brother.

“As for Islamic fundamentalism, that is not our way. We all are religious, but we are conservative. Our family and his father’s family come from the Palestinian fellaheen (farming class). “

Mohammed Salameh served two years in the Jordanian army as a conscript, according to his uncle, and then entered the University of Jordan in Amman for Islamic studies. His family had hoped he would study medicine or law, but the results from his matriculation exam were not good enough for admission to those highly competitive faculties.

“Mohammed might have become a teacher, but probably the pay was too low for him to help the family,” Amer Salameh said. “So, about six years ago, he left for the United States, planning to find a career that paid enough so that he could help with his brothers’ and sisters’ education.”

The Salameh clan of Biddiya is numerous, with as many of its members living away from the town as near it--and it is just one of seven Salameh clans on the West Bank, in Israel and in Jordan.

At the town’s school, a younger Palestinian sought to explain how far Islamic fundamentalism and political terrorism were from the consciousness of Biddiya’s residents.

“To explain how conservative we are, I should tell you that we tend olive trees almost exclusively,” he said. “These take years and years to grow, but then produce for centuries. We have trees that go back to Roman times, and that is 2,000 years ago. We hold to traditional ways in everything.

“That one of our sons, even one who grew up far away from Biddiya, tried to blow up this trade center in New York is, well, such a remote possibility that I have trouble grasping its meaning. Why? Can anyone explain why?”