KSAT-TV

Sources: Credit Card Links Doctor To Hijackers

Alhazmi Listed On Federal Security Document

Posted: 6:53 p.m. CDT September 16, 2001 Updated: 5:16 p.m. CDT September 17, 2001

SAN ANTONIO -- Sources have told KSAT 12 News that a Visa credit card linked the World Trade Center hijackers with a San Antonio physician, who is considered to be a possible terrorist threat.

Albader Alhazmi (pictured, right), 34, was among 52 people named in a Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration document dated Sept. 13., two days after the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The document stated that Alhazmi, a fourth-year resident physician at the radiology department at the University of Texas Health Science Center, was considered a threat to U.S. aircraft operators because he may be associated with terrorist activities.

The document alerted aircraft security personnel that Alhazmi may travel or attempt to travel by commercial aircraft.

Federal officials urged security personnel to deny Alhazmi travel by aircraft and to immediately notify local and federal authorities, the document stated.

Alhazmi remained in detention in New York Monday on immigration violations, but he has not been arrested.

Earlier this week, FBI agents questioned colleagues at the health science center about Alhazmi and went looking for him at his Northwest Side home.

"Obviously, we are shocked," said Dr. Jerald Dodd, chairman of radiology at the health science center. "(We don't know) that in fact he's involved in any way ... we have not received any specific confirmation to that."

Dodd said that Alhazmi was a resident in good standing who was recruited from Saudi Arabia in 1997. Alhazmi was currently in a five-year study program where he made rounds at Wilford Hall Medical Center and at Brooke Army Medical Center.

"He was a good man, I thought," Dodd said. "I got along well with him and I had no personal encounters that would have led me to believe he was anything other than a decent individual."

"The only thing that clearly was different about him is that he was clearly a religious man," he said.

Immediately, after the attacks Tuesday, federal agents raided Alhazmi's Northwest Side home and confiscated several boxes and a computer. They also seized Alhazmi's records at the health science center.

"The most unsettling part is the potential for having someone among us, who we know intimately, if you will, who has a separate agenda from what we understand to know," Dodd said.

On Saturday, FBI agents said that they seized PC 32 from the medical school library's computer lab.

Sources told KSAT 12 News that while looking into a travel Web site, FBI officials traced a transaction back to a user at the medical school.

Dodd said that Alhazmi was a resident in good standing and that they worked closely in the abdominal imaging division.

"We're very distraught over the situation, very concerned, we are taking the stance that an individual is innocent until proven guilty," he said.

Depending on the outcome of the investigation, health science center officials said that Dr. Alhazmi is free to return to the school if he is cleared.

They said that the only concern Alhazmi expressed about living in America was that he felt his young son was becoming more accustomed to American ways.

ABC News: Men Were To Meet Doctor

Meanwhile, two men in FBI custody were headed to San Antonio to meet with the San Antonio radiologist, ABC News reported.

According to ABC News, Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweek Azmath were on their way to the Alamo City to meet with Albader Alhazmi the day after the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon.

Khan and Azmath failed to make it to San Antonio after authorities pulled them off an Amtrak train in Fort Worth that was headed to San Antonio Wednesday.

Both are being held in New York as material witnesses.

Flight Training Schools Probed

Much of the federal investigation also involved probing flight training schools to find out if hijackers may have trained with them. They also questioned flight schools at local airports.

According to a report in the Washington Post, the Pentagon confirmed that men with the same names as some of the hijackers had addresses in San Antonio and one of them graduated from the Defense Language School at Lackland Air Force Base and two from the School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base.

The owner of the Alpha Tango Flight School at San Antonio International Airport said that he contacted the FBI and turned over his school records after recognizing some surnames of the hijackers, but he said that some of the names are as common as Smith and Jones.

He said that he had not heard from federal authorities yet.

-- Anonymous, September 18, 2001

Answers

HoustonChron

Sept. 18, 2001, 11:01PM

Doctor's arrest jolts hospital co-workers

By ARMANDO VILLAFRANCA and POLLY ROSS HUGHES Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle

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."

-- Anonymous, September 19, 2001