Posted on 09/19/2001 2:32:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
SAN ANTONIO -- At work, school and home, nothing about Dr. Al-Badr Al-Hazmi made him appear suspicious.
So his co-workers and school officials were jolted Wednesday when FBI agents came to ask questions about him and to search his locker at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio where he is a resident radiologist.
Al-Hazmi, 34, has since been taken to New York where he is being held as a material witness in last week's terrorist attacks.
"It caught me completely off guard. It was shocking information," said Dr. Gerald D. Dodd III, radiology department chairman.
"Obviously we don't want to believe that. We trained this individual. We worked with him going on five years now and worked side by side with him. It's extremely hard to make that leap to believe this gentleman was involved in terrorist activity."
Since news of his arrest, others talked about how his culture set the Saudi national and his family apart.
A man who cut his yard remembered that when he knocked on his door to get paid, his wife would never answer the door. She would have one of the older of her three children talk to him.
Another neighbor remembered seeing a group of Muslim women and their children take nightly walks through the neighborhood. The women were in traditional dress that covered them from head to toe except for a small opening in their headdress that allowed them to see their way.
The neighbors who best knew Al-Hazmi were two other Muslim families that lived within blocks of each other. But those families moved out two weeks ago.
"They just kinda kept to themselves. They obviously only hung out with the other Muslim families," said Ty Heath, a fourth-year medical student at the health science center who lives two duplexes down from Al-Hazmi. "Last time anybody saw him was Monday night, the night before the (attacks)."
A retired schoolteacher who shared a duplex with Al-Hazmi would not talk about her next-door neighbor, nor would another family sharing the same cul-de-sac. It seemed no one in the tiny enclave of townhomes in northwest San Antonio exchanged more than a passing greeting with the young doctor.
During the three years Heath lived in the Villas of Northgate development she said the few Muslim families in the neighborhood only interacted with each other. She also remembers seeing one Muslim family move out as another moved into their unit.
"They were the only neighbors that I know of that they actually talked to," she said of Al-Hazmi's family.
A yardman who asked not to be identified said he remembered as many as six Muslim families living in the neighborhood. He said one gave him a business card identifying him as a language teacher at Lackland Air Force Base, another claimed to be an embassy worker and a third said he was a pilot.
"We are surprised beyond belief that the network of terrorist organizations can be as far reaching as the borders of this country," said Francisco Cigarroa, president of the health science center. "I think you can amplify that sentiment when we have learned that there's a linkage with an individual who was in the residency within the department of radiology."
School officials had last seen Al-Hazmi at a Friday radiology conference. On Wednesday, FBI officials came to the school to question officials about Al-Hazmi, who had been a student at the health science center since 1997.
He was scheduled to take his radiology board exams last Friday. During the past month he had been working at Wilford Hall, a military hospital at Lackland, in a program that rotates resident radiologists among the health science center, Wilford Hall and Brooks Army Medical Hospital.
Dodd said Al-Hazmi represented a diverse group of nationalities and ethnic groups at the hospital who seamlessly assimilated into the health center community of students and professionals.
"I've never seen him excited," Dodd said. "I enjoyed working with him. He did have a sense of humor. We're in a clinical environment so we tend to keep our interactions fairly professional so there's not a lot of frivolity in the workplace. But there's an easy attitude, if you will, and he was easy to work with."
He said Al-Hazmi was known as a devout Muslim because he took breaks to pray during the day.
"I personally have suspended my emotions toward his involvement or potential involvement at the moment. Obviously for us, for him, for San Antonio the best outcome would be that he is found not to be involved," Dodd said. "We're in limbo emotionally waiting to see what happens."
Al-Hazmi is in the fifth and final year of his residency.
"The faculty and residents agreed that you possess the qualifications and attributes that we look for in our residents," Dr. Ewell Clarke, director of the residency program wrote to Al-Hazmi, who once received honors for helping the poor in Saudi Arabia.
He received his medical degree in 1991 from King Abdulaziz University in Jedda, Saudi Arabia.
Before moving to San Antonio, Al-Hazmi worked at Saudi Aramco's Medical Services Organization in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia provided all of Al-Hazmi's salary and support during his residency in Texas.
His administrative support and emergency contact is listed in documents as an employee in the career development division at Aramco Services Co. in Houston.
Starting in November 1995, Al-Hazmi spent six months at the Tulane University Medical Center's School of Medicine undergoing a review of the basic sciences and clinical sciences.
"I am a Saudi Arab physician with a career goal of becoming a specialist in radiology," Al-Hazmi explained in his résumé. "Following completion of my speciality training, I will return to Saudi Arabia to provide health care to my countrymen."
During the three years Heath lived in the Villas of Northgate development she said the few Muslim families in the neighborhood only interacted with each other. She also remembers seeing one Muslim family move out as another moved into their unit.
Highly suspecious.....now.
The incohehence of this remark notwithstanding, it expresses a naivete that died Sept. 11.
The alleged operative, Raed M. Hijazi, lived in Boston and worked as a cabdriver here in the late 1990s. When applying for a license to drive a cab in Boston, Hijazi said he was living in Almarabh's Boston Street apartment and listed Almarabh as his reference.
Certainly under THESE trying times.
If they acted like our minds think they should act....we'd have called the cops BEFORE they do their evil things.
You quoted the same two paragraphs that I was going to do!
I agree. They seem to reuse houses and passports, and probably flight training books in Arabic.
Very economical terrorists!
Bet the house is paid for. ID papers stay at the house, and as one group leaves to either kill or go home, the next batch moves in.
What's spooky is, doctor. Access to what, by way of chemical or bio?
This is called "hiding in plain sight".
No kidding.....University of Texas....old stompin' grounds of Paul Begala.
Boston and other public school districts are importing teachers to teach math and fill other slots.
We need to look at U.S. teaching colleges and the teachers' unions and point fingers there too.
Looking for access to radioactive material?
Bump!
I'm sure plenty of that was accessable at Los Alamos during the Clinton Regime.
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