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4000 Israeli Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack Manar TV - Sept 17, 2001 With the announcement of the attacks at the
World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the
Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4000
Israelis who work at the two towers. Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned
anything about those Israelis and later
it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day
the incident took place. No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded
in the attacks. Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the Jordanian al-Watan newspaper that
those Israelis remained absent that day based on hints from the Israeli General
Security Apparatus, the Shabak, the fact which evoked unannounced suspicions on
American officials who wanted to know how the Israeli government
learned about the incident before
it occurred, and the reasons why
...this is the story...
5 Israelis detained for `puzzling
behavior' after WTC tragedy
By Yossi Melman
Five Israelis who had worked for a moving
company based in New Jersey are
being held in U.S. prisons for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation has
described as "puzzling behavior"
following the terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York last Tuesday.
The five are expected to be
deported sometime soon.
The families of the five, who asked that
their names not be released, said
that their sons had been questioned by the FBI for hours on end, had been
kept in solitary confinement for
three days, and had been humiliated, stripped of their clothes and
blindfolded.
The mother of one of the young men
explained the chain of events as
she understands it to Ha'aretz:
She said that the five had worked for the
company, which is owned by an
Israeli, for between two months and two years. They had been arrested some four
hours after the attack on the
Twin Towers while filming the smoking skyline from the roof of their
company's building, she said. It
appears that they were spotted by
one of the neighbors who called the police and the FBI.
The mother said that the families and
friends of the five in Israel had
known nothing of the men's whereabouts for a number of days.
"When they finally let my son make a
phone call for the first time to
a friend in the United States two days ago, he told him that he had been tortured by
the FBI in a basement," the
mother said. "He was stripped to
his underwear; he was blindfolded and questioned for 14 hours. They thought that because he
has citizenship of a European
country as well as of Israel that
he was working for the Mossad [Israel's secret service]."
Seven FBI agents later stormed the
apartment of one of the Israelis,
searched it and questioned his roommate. The Israeli owner of the company, who has
U.S. citizenship, was also
questioned. Both men were subsequently released.
The families here complained that the
Israeli consulate in New York and
the situation room set up by the
Foreign Ministry there to locate missing Israelis had done nothing to help their sons. The
Foreign Ministry told the
families that the FBI had denied holding the five and that the consulate had chosen
to believe the FBI, the mother
said.
The five were transferred out of the
FBI's facility on Saturday
morning and are now being held in two prisons in New Jersey by the Immigration and
Naturalization Services. They are
charged with illegally residing in the United States and working there without
permits.
The Foreign Ministry said in response
that it had been informed by the
consulate in New York that the FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior." They
are said to have had been caught
videotaping the disaster and
shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery. |
