Once suspected to be a terrorist, Karachi-born Pakistani-American Salman Hamdani is finally

Once suspected to be a terrorist, Karachi-born Pakistani-American Salman Hamdani is finally being recognized as a hero, according to a report in the Express Tribune.

The 26-year-old New York resident went missing on Sept. 11, 2001, shortly after American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

In the chaos of that day, his mother Talat Hamdani was initially not worried when she couldn’t get in touch with him and assumed that her son, a New York Police Department cadet and paramedic, had gone to work as usual.

But then the night came and went and he still didn’t get in touch with her, she went to Hamdani’s office at Rockefeller University in Manhattan, only to learn that he had not shown up for work on Sept. 11.

Talat then joined the scores of people frantically searching for their loved ones in Manhattan. But Hamdani was nowhere to be found; neither the hospitals nor the morgue had any record of him.

In the atmosphere of suspicion that followed after the attacks, the Hamdanis were visited by NYPD detectives who confiscated a photo of him posing with an Afghan student. Soon after, the New York Post published a story on Hamdani titled: “Missing or Hiding? — Mystery of NYPD Cadet from Pakistan.”

The story, which claimed that Hamdani was being sought by the FBI, also mentioned that he had been seen leaving for work “Koran in hand,” and implied that he was being considered a suspect in the 9/11 attack, according to the Express Tribune story.

For six months, the Hamdanis did not know the fate of their son.

But then, in March 2002, two police officers came to their house to tell them that Hamdani’s remains had been identified. He had died at ground zero, and his EMT bag had been found along with his remains.

Hamdani, far from being involved in the attacks, had headed straight for the Twin Towers after the first plane hit to try and help people, and that’s what he had been doing when the tower fell.

Over 200 days after his death, his funeral was held at New York’s Islamic Cultural Center, with his coffin draped in the American flag. In April the same year, Rockefeller University announced the establishment of the Shaheed Mohammed Salman Hamdani Memorial Fund, a scholarship meant to benefit Pakistani-American students.

Hamdani’s name is also explicitly mentioned in the Patriot Act, though it does not appear in the first responders section of the 9/11 memorial. And now, the street on which he lived, 204th in Bayside, Queens, will bear his name.

The decision was made unanimously by the local community board. For Talat Hamdani, who has since become a prominent activist speaking against the stereotyping of Muslims in America, it is a long-awaited vindication.

Still, she says that she wants her son’s name included in the first responder section of the 9/11 memorial. “Justice takes a long time,” she was quoted as saying by CBS, “but truth does prevail.”

By News Dispatches