FBI Draws Cheers With N.J. Sweep

On Satur-day morning, FBI agents surrounded a brownstone apartment building in this eclectic New York suburb, home to thousands of expatriate Arabs. While a green military helicopter circled overhead, the agents smashed in a window and knocked down a door.

Then they carted off three men from the building, populated mostly by Arab families. The agents wouldn’t say whether they had anything to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center, once visible from here.

Outside, behind a line of yellow police tape, about 200 men, women and children cheered the agents on. They broke into chants of “USA!” when the first young man was led away in handcuffs.

“Burn in hell!” shouted one woman in the crowd.

“Get ‘em all!” shouted another.

Even in this city of 240,000, where 1 in 5 residents is of Arab descent, there are people who can barely contain their rage toward those who resemble the presumed enemy.

The scene on Tonnele Avenue is being repeated in other neighborhoods as federal agents fan out across the country searching for the network of people who may have had a hand in the largest mass murder in American history.

Saturday’s raid focused on a building in a neighborhood where people from places such as Egypt, Syria and Morocco live next to immigrants from Latin America, as well as Italian American and African American families.

The brownstone is only two blocks from the mosque that was the spiritual home of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. And it is just a block from an Islamic cultural center where Arab Americans held a memorial service Saturday for the victims of Tuesday’s attacks. The service ended just as the raid was beginning.

“There is fear in everybody’s heart,” said Ahmed Shedeed, director of the Islamic Center of Jersey City, which hosted the service. “We are as American as everyone else. We have relatives who died [in the blasts]. And as Muslims we feel the accusations against our community. Our grief is doubled.”

George Hanna, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen who has lived in Jersey City for 20 years, says no one has said anything unkind to him in the days since Tuesday’s attacks. Still, he can sense the anger of the people around him toward Arabs. “I feel it,” he said. “I can see it on the face of everybody.”

Hanna’s was one of just a handful of Arab faces in the crowd gathered on Tonnele Avenue. He seemed to be well-practiced in keeping a low profile. A woman wearing a traditional Muslim head-dress quickly pushed a stroller past.

The mood on the street was one of vengeance. After days of watching replays of exploding skyscrapers and interviews with grieving victims on television, people outside the brownstone believed they were seeing their government fight back.

“These people are trying to take over the U.S.,” said Patty Salvatore, a Jersey City native, after an additional two men were taken out of the building. “This is our home. This is our neighborhood. We’ll never forget [the victims]. And we’ll never forget that they’re gone.” She then used a vulgar word to describe those who she says are trying to destroy her country.

An FBI spokeswoman in Newark, N.J., said “at least one person was detained for questioning,” but she would not confirm any arrests.

During the five-hour operation, agents wearing latex gloves emerged from the building several times carrying paper bags filled with evidence. At one point, they crossed the police lines and walked through the crowd, knocking on the door of the apartment building across the street.

“They’re looking for the super!” a resident shouted.

The manager of the second building emerged with a set of keys. He said later that the agents asked him if his building’s security cameras might have captured any movement from across the street. (They did not).

Meanwhile, on the third floor of the targeted building, a woman holding a baby looked down at the agents and the crowd below. She wept profusely. After the agents left, she told reporters that her husband, Syrian native Achou Abd Salam, had been taken away by the federal agents because he had overstayed his visa.

“He was staying longer until the baby was born,” the woman said through an interpreter. She was eight months pregnant.

Several residents of the building said the agents were most interested in the residents of apartment 202, a group of quiet men who “worked at night” and did not socialize with other tenants.