Thread of a threat led to wide dragnet

The FBI came for Tarek Albasti as he cooked pasta in his restaurant.

Agents came for Hesham Salah Salem at his fiance’s house. He was waiting, his bag packed. He knew they had his brother.

On that Thursday, Oct. 11, the FBI detained Albasti, Salem and seven of their friends and relatives, who all knew each other from Egypt. They were accused of no crime, charged with nothing. They later learned they were rounded up because one of their wives -- now estranged -- had called the FBI, saying her husband had talked about killing himself in a crash.

“You feel like the whole thing is chaos, it’s crazy,” said Albasti, 29, an Evansville restaurant owner who is the lone U.S. citizen in the group. “We are guilty of nothing.”

The FBI has released all of the men, although the INS is still holding two on immigration violations. The men say they understand that the government was just doing its job. But jail is still jail, they say, and they worry that the government will come for them again.

Their detention and release is a scene playing out nationwide, as law enforcement agents try to protect citizens from terrorism, sometimes scooping up people first and investigating later. Civil liberties advocates worry that innocent people are being swept up in the fight against terrorism. Some Evansville residents feel that happened in their town and rallied to keep Albasti’s restaurant open while he was in jail.

But FBI officials say that, these days, any potential threat must be taken seriously, even if innocent people are jailed while the facts get sorted out.

The Evansville men were publicly linked to terrorism -- their photographs and their arrests splashed on the front page of the local newspaper. They are counted among the 1,147 people detained or arrested nationwide since Sept. 11, held on immigration violations or as material witnesses for grand juries.

No one arrested or detained nationwide has been charged in connection with the attacks, although one man was charged with perjury. Officials have refused to say how many detainees have been released, but a spokesman for the Justice Department said Friday that most remain behind bars.

The FBI makes no apologies for what happened to the Evansville men. Virginia Wright, an FBI spokeswoman in Chicago, said agents have been run ragged, investigating every anthrax hoax, every phone call.

“Obviously, their release indicates to me that the information initially provided was not substantiated,” Wright said.

Coming to America

Albasti moved to America first, in 1994. He was on the Egyptian national rowing team when he met his wife, an Evansville native who studied in Egypt. The Albastis bought a restaurant, The Crazy Tomato, and Albasti’s uncle left Egypt to help run it.

Other men, who also had been on the rowing team, followed. Albasti hired three friends at The Crazy Tomato, an upscale Italian eatery. Salem found a job at The Texas Roadhouse, a steakhouse.

The men played soccer in the mornings. They saw each other on Fridays at the local mosque. In the past year, four married Americans. Salem got engaged.

Albasti dreamed of being a pilot, and his wife’s parents, an Evansville lawyer and a poet, bought him flying lessons. He hoped to go to a professional flying school, maybe this fall.

But after the attacks Sept. 11, Albasti decided to wait. As part of the FBI’s initial investigation of flight schools, agents pulled Albasti in four days after the attacks. Albasti didn’t hear from agents for weeks afterward, not until his friend’s wife called the FBI.

Fathy and La-Tennia Abdelkhalek had married six months earlier, after knowing each other a month. On Oct. 9, La-Tennia Abdelkhalek said, her husband told her he was suicidal and said, “I’m gonna make a crash.”

She said she told him that she wouldn’t let him die.

The next day, she reported what her husband said to the FBI. She said she went to the Evansville office and took a lie detector test, and told agents that she had never seen explosives in the house, and that her husband sent money home for his four children. She said she never talked to agents about her husband’s friends.

On Thursday, Oct. 11, the day after she called, the men were picked up, one by one. When agents showed up at The Crazy Tomato, they waited for Albasti and his uncle to finish serving dinner before taking them.

The men said agents asked them questions such as these: Why are you here? Have you ever been to Afghanistan? What do you know about Fathy Abdelkhalek and his wife? Why did you learn to fly? How did you meet your wife? What do you think about the terrorist attacks? Why does everyone call Albasti’s uncle, “Uncle”?

After being questioned, the men were told they could each make one phone call. They spent that night in bunk beds in the same cell in a nearby jail.

A man who overstayed his visa was held on an immigration violation. The next day, in a closed hearing, the other eight men were held as material witnesses in the terrorist investigation and sent to Chicago.

In a small city

Evansville, with 122,000 residents and a riverboat casino called the Aztar, is countless strip malls from Cairo and a shout from Kentucky. Almost nine in 10 people here are white. Only 300 people belong to the local mosque. The Egyptians, people say, stuck out.

Days after the terrorist attacks, a man rammed his truck into the mosque. He broke the mosque’s windows. Other people called and left threatening messages.

After the men were picked up, The Crazy Tomato closed for the weekend, and the news spread. Their pictures appeared in the local media, as they were being taken in handcuffs from the jail to the airport.

Neighbors and friends and customers defended the men and rallied around them. Others were more wary.

Judy Schneider, an entrepreneur and wife of a pig farmer, was at her 30th high school reunion in Evansville that Saturday when someone told her this, “They got nine terrorists in Evansville.”

Schneider didn’t know the men, and the news first made her nervous about the men. But she didn’t like hearing that the men’s families didn’t know why they were being held.

Her friend, Sharon Anderson, who often eats at The Crazy Tomato, thought the allegations were ridiculous.

On Monday, Albasti’s wife opened The Crazy Tomato. People volunteered to help. A neighbor washed dishes. People sent flowers and cards. Loyal customers packed the restaurant. A couple drove down from Indianapolis to eat.

Schneider and Anderson ate lunch at the restaurant to show their support.

Waitress Crystal Neese said she worked 12 hours a day for six days in a row, but she didn’t mind. She said she never doubted her bosses and co-workers.

“A lot of people did, but they’re just stupid,” she said.

Her roommate, whom Neese has known since she was 4, wanted to kick her out of the apartment because she defended the men. Neese’s roommate has a new baby and worried about anthrax. “I would probably have been narrow-minded if I didn’t know them,” Neese said. “But you can’t help but think that way, given everything that’s going on.”

In cells 614 to 621

The eight Evansville men were sent to the sixth floor of the Chicago federal detention center, to cells 614 through 621.

The men say they asked why they were being held, but weren’t told a thing. They say they had to wait four days before talking to their lawyers. While in the detention center, they couldn’t call their families. They weren’t interviewed.

“After four days, I got scared,” said Tarek Omar, who was in cell 616. “I started pounding the door, yelling, `I need to talk to somebody. I need to know what’s going on.’ Nobody told me what was going on. Nobody told us anything.”

Albasti, in cell 620, said he prayed and cried. He worried about his wife and daughter. He shouted through his cell door to his uncle, two cells away, to take his blood-pressure medicine.

Salem, in cell 615, said he decided that he might be in prison forever, and decided to read books from the jail’s library.

The men conversed by shouting to each other through the doors. One man, who was on vacation and scheduled to fly home to Egypt the day after the men were detained, spoke no English. He didn’t understand what was happening, his friends said, and he stopped eating for four days.

On Oct. 18, a week after the men were picked up, FBI agents called the men into a room, one at a time. Albasti said he talked to the agents and walked out.

The only man left, in cell 621, Fathy Abdelkhalek, told Albasti congratulations. “I said, `I’ll be waiting for you,’” Albasti said.

The men changed out of their orange jumpsuits and into their clothes and waited for Abdelkhalek downstairs, but he never came. So they headed for home where the places all looked the same but felt different.

They want to stay

The FBI released Abdelkhalek on Oct. 26, 16 days after his wife called the FBI. He went home to Evansville. His friends and police came with him to his apartment, and police told his wife that he didn’t want to talk to her. He picked up his clothes and moved in with friends.

The Evansville men say they want to stay in America. They say they are overwhelmed by the community’s support. They say they understand why they were questioned. But they don’t understand why they were held without any answers.

“When I got my citizenship, I really felt like I was a citizen,” Albasti said. “But since this happened, I don’t. I don’t feel comfortable.”

The week after he was released, Salem married his girlfriend. He wants life to return to normal, but he feels people treat him differently now.

“Everybody around me, even my friends, they doubt me,” Salem said. “It’s a hard time for everyone. But it’s hard for a person to feel like everybody is looking at him. It gives a person a guilty feeling, just because he’s a different religion and a different nationality.”

The men worry they could be picked up again, any moment. They say they’re always looking over their shoulders. They worry about their friend being held by the INS.

And now, again, they worry about Abdelkhalek. Last week, the INS picked him up, too, on an immigration violation.

His wife, the woman who called the FBI, said the INS agents told her that her marriage to Abdelkhalek was a sham: He was still married to the mother of his four children in Egypt.