On that clear morning 10 years ago, Mohammed Salman Hamdani (23), a Pakistani-American, headed out from his home in Brooklyn, New York, to his new job as a researcher at Rockefeller University. While on his journey he suddenly noticed smoke pouring out of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan and realised something was dreadfully wrong.
Being a certified Emergency Medical Technician and a New York City Police Department cadet, Mr. Hamdani did not hesitate and used his official identification to get through restricted traffic and reach the burning towers to offer assistance to those trapped within.
He was never heard from again.
Until this point Mr. Hamdani's chilling story resembled that of 2,605 other New York City victims of the 9/11 terror attacks, which shook the United States to its very core and set in motion a chain of events that would reverberate across the world. What followed, however, was a disturbing narrative of minority discrimination and an early indicator that the U.S.' so-called “war on terror” would have a darker side.
Mr. Hamdani's mother, Talat, said to The Hindu on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, “We all knew that he would go down to the twin towers to help, because that was in him... he was a very genuine, kind, compassionate human being. But the fact that he would not come home and perish — that took a very long time for the family to accept that.”
She spent weeks on a fruitless search for Mr. Hamdani amidst the debris of the twin towers. “Then we went to different hospitals in search of him. Maybe he had lost his memory or maybe he had lost his eyesight. Maybe he could not talk or hear. But no such luck there either,” she said.
Nasty shock
One month later, in the very depths of mourning the loss of their son, the Hamdanis were greeted with a nasty shock — the New York Police Department had been circulating a flyer suggesting that their son was possibly involved with the terrorists who carried out the attack. By that time, faced with dwindling hope, Ms. Hamdani was on her way to Mecca, to pray for her son.
“The story hit the media the next day when I was not even here to defend myself,” she said, adding that the New York Post in particular lived up to its reputation and insinuated that he was missing or hiding, that he went out with a Koran that day, that he was seen at the mid-town tunnel at 11a.m. and that his neighbours were wondering what kind of a person lived next door to them. “It was everything negative that you could possibly think about,” she said.
By then the entire atmosphere appeared to have been poisoned against the Muslim community in America, and even Hindus and Sikhs got caught up in the intensifying scrutiny of the Bush administration. Several Sikhs, including Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station operator, were victims of hate crimes in the wake of 9/11.
Ironically the possibility that Mr. Hamdani had been arrested held out a ray of hope for his mother. “There was hope that he had been detained... Some Indians were detained, some Jews came back from [federal government detention] saying that they had been let go because they were not Muslims. A couple of Indian doctors came back and they even testified before the U.S. Senate,” she said.
Yet that was not to be. While Mr. Hamdani's remains were found amidst the rubble of the collapsed towers a month later, it was only in March 2002, six months later that they authorities completed their investigation of his case and confirmed that he was in fact a victim of the attacks.
Mr. Hamdani was subsequently declared a hero by the U.S. Congress and specifically his name was mentioned in the U.S. PATRIOT Act for acting “heroically during the attacks on the U.S... [He] is believed to have gone to the World Trade Centre to offer rescue assistance and is now missing.” At the at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York in 2002 he was further memorialised as a hero by Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Congressman Gary Ackerman, among others.
“It was a reputation redeemed,” Ms. Hamdani said.
