The NYPD is hunting for one of its former cadets, initially reported missing in the Twin Towers attack, issuing an urgent “hold and detain” order for the Pakistani native.
Mohammad Hamdani’s mother is convinced the government already has her son in custody, simply because he’s a Muslim.
“They have him. I don’t know who ‘they’ is -it could be the CIA, FBI or any of the other task forces, whatever,” said Talat Hamdani.
Hamdani was last seen, Koran in hand, leaving his Bayside, Queens home for his job as a research assistant at Rockefeller University, but he never made it to work.
His family distributed missing-person fliers in the fear that the 23-year- old, who is trained as an emergency medical technician, went instead to the World Trade Center to help and was killed.
But investigators for the FBI and NYPD have since questioned the family about which Internet chat rooms he visited and if he was political.
Hamdani, a graduate of Queens College with a biochemistry degree, had been in the NYPD cadet program for three years. He became “inactive” because he needed to work full time, his mother said.
Police sources said he hadn’t been to work at the NYPD since April, but he still carried official identification.
One source told The Post: “That tells me they’re not looking for this guy at the bottom of the rubble. The thing that bothers me is, if he is up to some tricks, he can walk past anybody [using the ID card].”
Hamdani’s mother, who has been in the United States for two decades, denied her son was political or a religious fundamentalist. She said she believes he was arrested shortly after the disaster.
“The government has him, like [it] has many of the Muslim kids,” she said. “They are interrogating him, but they will release him one day.”
He has been listed in several missing-persons databases and has been mentioned in several news reports as a victim of the collapse.
The Police Department refused to comment on the case, but investigators privately theorize that the family’s first notion was correct: Hamdani died in the disaster.
Still, sources close to the investigation say the hunt is still on – cops at the Midtown Tunnel reported spotting someone who looked like Hamdani yesterday morning.
Meanwhile, the family has turned to prayer as they await word of Hamdani’s fate. His parents and two brothers were preparing last night to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. “God will listen to us and he will give him back,” the mother said. “God is just testing my faith.”
With additional reporting by Philip Messing and Larry Celona