HYDERABAD, 1 October — FBI agents have questioned the families of two Indian men detained in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, Indian intelligence sources said yesterday.
Two US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents spent two days in the southern city of Hyderabad investigating the backgrounds of Ayub Ali Khan and Muhammad Jawed Azmat, who were arrested on a train in Texas, the sources said.
Some family members, relatives and friends of the duo were called to an undisclosed location on Thursday and Friday and were questioned by the FBI officials in the presence of officials from India’s Intelligence Bureau.
The family members of the two suspects refused to divulge the details of their interrogation by the FBI. The FBI officials are also said to have quizzed a close friend of Azmat and Ayub, but his identity was not revealed.
The questioning centered around the educational qualifications of the two friends, details of their passports and their financial transactions since they left India some nine years ago.
The Intelligence Bureau also shared with the FBI agents details of investigations carried out by its officials and local police since the detention of the duo in Texas.
The FBI agents, one from the US and the other from the bureau’s liaison office in New Delhi, left Hyderabad during the weekend, they said. Khan and Azmat were found traveling without legal identification and with items US police described as suspicious.
These included several thousand dollars in cash, hair dye and box cutters like those used by some of the hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Hyderabad police subsequently registered cases against the two after it was found they had supplied false information to obtain their passports.
According to their passports, Khan is aged 51 and Azmat is 47. But police say both are in their mid-30s.
Both friends, who did odd jobs in the US, had no criminal record, police said, but added they had together sent 2.8 million rupees ($58,500) to their families in the last two years.
Intelligence Bureau inquiries also found no evidence of links between any terror group and the two men who went to the US in 1993.
Like many countries around the world India’s central police is part of Interpol and cooperates with other police forces in investigations. But in this case, sources say, the FBI may have obtained special permission from the Indian government to allow the probe to take place.
The US team’s visit was kept a secret, and the city police and even its intelligence wing were kept in the dark.
