They were trained here and then sent over there to fight

They were trained here, and then sent over there to fight.”Some of the same Mujaheddin – and the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles supplied by the US – are now likely to be the target for American military strikes. It is the sort of policy that has come back to haunt America more than once.For a few moments, the mosque seemed a sad and crazy place to be. Then a young white mother, Providence Hogan, carried in her four-month-old daughter, Sophia, and a bunch of flowers. She handed them to the frightened young men awaiting prayer.”I just wanted them to know that not all Americans see them as terrorists,” she said.

And the card on the bouquet restored a little sanity to the occasion “Our enemy is a common one,” it read “Ignorance.”. Two Asian men were murdered in the United States in what appeared to be the first misguided revenge killings for last week’s terror attacks.Both were petrol station owners in relatively affluent big-city suburbs.
One was a Pakistani Muslim, the other was an Indian Sikh, who may have been attacked because his beard and turban reminded his attackers of Osama bin Laden, the man widely thought to be behind last week’s attacks and named by the American authorities as a main suspect.In Pleasant Grove, a middle-class suburb of Dallas, Waqar Hassan Choudhry, 40, was shot dead at a convenience store shortly after 10pm on Saturday night. There was no evidence of a robbery, and local detectives told Mr Choudhry’s family they believed his killing was motivated by blind revenge.Officially, the police were saying little. “We don’t know who did it or why, it’s too early in the investigation,” Sergeant Gary Kilpatrick of the Dallas police homicide department said “At this point, we can’t prove or disprove anything. We’re looking for witnesses and checking the evidence.”But the victim’s cousin, Mazhar Rehman, said yesterday he was almost certainly killed because of his race or religion. “We feel this is more likely to be backlash than robbery,” Mr Rehman, a businessman from Glasgow, said.”My cousin was saying that there have been other incidents in Dallas, with people being abused or beaten up.”Mr Choudhry, married with four girls, was from Karachi and had been in America for 10 years. He had recently moved to Dallas from Edison, New Jersey, home to one of the east coast’s largest Pakistani communities, to run the petrol station with another immigrant.In Mesa, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, police reported that 52-year-old Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot dead by a white male who drove a pick-up truck into Mr Sodhi’s Chevron station and opened fire with a handgun on Saturday afternoon.That killing was apparently the opening salvo in a shooting spree that led the unnamed assailant to attack two other petrol stations, at least one of which was run by men of Arab origin.

Police later spotted a Chevrolet pick-up matching the description of the assailant’s vehicle, traced the registration and made an arrest after raiding a home.Again, the police would not publicly speculate on a motive, but an acquaintance of Mr Sodhi’s, a fellow Sikh called Hari Simran Singh Khalsa, told reporters he was convinced it was a hate crime.”We’re mostly distraught. We happen to practise a religion that makes us look like the bad guy,” Mr Khalsa said. “As Americans, we’re shocked.”Mr Sodhi, who had a wife and three adult children, had been planning to return to his native India to live with one of his sons. His killing was the culmination of several days of intimidation directed at Sikhs in the area. “We’ve had people that work in convenience stores and gas stations and have been unable to work this week because of overt harassment,” Mr Khalsa said. Because of the beards and turbans, he added, “we look more like bin Laden than the Muslims do”.Petrol station owners have been most vulnerable to hate attacks in recent days across the United States, in part because they are relatively visible and often alone, especially at night.Taxi drivers have also been insulted, threatened and attacked. In many cities, police are protecting at-risk sites such as mosques and community centres Most, if not all, politicians have appealed for calm..

When the lift doors open on the tenth floor of 845 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, the first thing a visitor sees is a large photograph of the Statue of Liberty dwarfed by the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. The shock of the image makes you stand still long enough to have to stop the lift doors closing.You are in the British Consulate-General, a place normally reserved for people who have lost passports or for businessmen thinking of investing in “Cool Britannia”, but a place that has become a hive of frenzied and selfless activity.
It is here that efforts to help Britons bereaved or traumatised by the atrocities have been co-ordinated. Round the clock, staff – and their spouses – have been taking calls, giving help and grimly compiling a list of the 300 Britons thought to have died in the tragedy. At their head is the consul, Patrick Owens.Mr Owens, 48, represented British interests in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and in Albania, from where he evacuated Britons under fire when the country imploded during the 1997 pyramid scandal. But yesterday, even he admitted nothing could have prepared him for the events of last week.He said: “As an experienced consular officer, I am trained to deal with difficult situations, but a thing of this magnitude, this enormity, not just over the Brits but all the thousands of others, is very traumatic indeed My staff have been exceptional. They have been working in shifts round the clock to help as many British people as we can.”Some of the calls they have had to take have been very upsetting but I have to say they have all, especially the younger ones, been bloody marvellous and I am very proud of them.”When the scale of the disaster became apparent, the consulate-general staff had an emergency centre running within an hour. An office that usually processes hundreds of visa applications a day became a call-centre where details were taken of missing people.

Hundreds more Britons who were on holiday contacted the emergency room after losing possessions, money and passports in the explosions.While staff normally replace up to 10 passports a week, they issued 150 in the first few days. The bleaker side of the job was dealing with Britons living in New York desperate to find loved ones and friends. Staff trawled hospitals, worked with New York police and regularly visited a centre set up as a clearing house for lost-and-found people.Mostly, there is no good news to pass on; occasionally, there is. “There was one man staying in the Marriott hotel who popped down for breakfast in a T-shirt and some shorts when he heard the planes crash into the twin towers,” said Mr Owens. “He had a bit of money in his back pocket and thought he’d better get out of there. Somehow, he ended up in New Jersey and it was a couple of days before we could find him and reunite him with his wife. That was very pleasant, but there have not been many of those.” Each time Mr Owens’ staff establish that someone is missing, the details are passed back to London and on to a local police station.