EVANSVILLE, Ind. -- The food's the same at the Crazy Tomato. So are the prices and service. But what was a popular place for pasta 18 months ago now attracts a fraction of its regular clientele.

Business plummeted after the restaurant's owner, Tarek Albasti, was arrested by the FBI with seven other Egyptian men as alleged terrorists plotting attacks against the United States. Pictured in prison stripes, the men were splashed across the front pages, ridiculed and shunned even after their release by people who assumed their guilt. Whispers about flying lessons and money trails from Evansville to Egypt spread rapidly.

Tarek Albasti, one of the Egyptians held by the U.S. government, is embraced by his mother-in-law, Mary Frances Baugh. Albasti owns the Crazy Tomato restaurant in Evansville, whose has business declined. The men have been trailed by suspicion since the arrests. (Photo/Terrence Antonio James -- Chicago Tribune)

But the FBI said it had all been a mistake. And at a meeting last month with more than 100 people in the Muslim community here, the FBI offered a rare apology because suspicion about the arrests -- which resulted from a bogus tip -- hung over the men's heads for so long and disrupted their lives.

"The situation that happened to you was horrible," Thomas V. Fuentes, the FBI's agent in charge in Indiana, said during a meeting at the Islamic Center of Evansville. "On behalf of the FBI, I will apologize. . . ."

The gesture clears their names in a town they have struggled to make their permanent home. But it doesn't mend a once-thriving business or restore the community's trust. The men acknowledge the FBI was understandably wary and cautious after Sept. 11, 2001. But their understanding has its limits.

As part of a national roundup in the weeks after the terrorist attacks, the "Evansville 8" were among 50 people held as material witnesses in maximum security jails without being charged with a crime. Thousands of more men from Middle Eastern countries were questioned, some arrested and detained, allegedly for links to terrorism, only to be let go or deported on immigration violations. Civil liberties groups protested that the arrests amounted to racial stereotyping.

"It didn't make any difference if I was a citizen or not as long as you fit the profile of an Arab or Muslim who has taken flying lessons," said Albasti, 31, surveying his near-empty restaurant. Albasti was arrested along with his uncle and six friends and co-workers on Oct. 11, 2001.

"It was quite a stunning development," Evansville Mayor Russ Lloyd Jr. said. "It was a complete shock. People were saying, 'My gosh, this is Evansville.' "

The city of 120,000 is predominantly white, and the Muslim community of 300 members at the city's only mosque is tiny.

"These weren't some folks that just happened to live in the same city with us," said the Rev. Daniel Schroeder, pastor of St. Matthew's United Church of Christ, a local pastor for 15 years. "We knew these people."

All the men who had been detained knew each other in Cairo and had come to the United States seeking jobs that would allow them to send money home to their families. Albasti was the first to arrive in Evansville in 1994, a year after marrying native Carolyn Baugh, whom he met in Egypt while she was studying there. At first he was a busboy, then manager at the Crazy Tomato before he and his wife purchased the restaurant in 1997. An uncle came over to help them run it. Then one friend after another, most former rowing partners on his country's national team. Albasti hired three of the men.

Their lives were simple: working as cooks and waiters, playing soccer in the morning, praying on Fridays at the mosque and socializing among themselves. For the men, Evansville, a sleepy city on the Kentucky border, had been a culture shock after life in a bustling metropolis of more than 10 million.

"We knew America by the towers [in New York] and all that," said Mohamed Youssef, a waiter at the Crazy Tomato who arrived four years ago. "This was a quiet city."

Politics was never a hot topic. But the 9/11 attacks changed everything. Four days after the attacks, Albasti was visited by the FBI, who wanted to know about flying lessons he had taken. They had been a gift from his father-in-law, a local attorney. But the agents wanted to know more, about what he knew about terrorism and Osama bin Laden. He answered. They went away.

Less than a month later, the FBI was back. This time, Albasti and his uncle were arrested as they cooked pasta at the restaurant. The other men were picked up at work or at home. One had been waiting for the lawmen, having heard about the others' arrests. Aware of Albasti's earlier run-in, though, they assumed things would pass away in a few hours.

"I thought they would ask us some general questions and it would be over with," said Khaled Nassr, 27, who has been in the United States for three years.

Hours turned into overnight and then a week in custody. They were paraded before cameras, flown to Chicago escorted by armed U.S. marshals. Tears flowed. Their wives and girlfriends -- unable to talk to them -- also were left in the dark. Albasti imagined that the horrors of rapes and beatings he saw in the HBO series "Oz" would be visited on them during their stay at the federal detention center in Chicago. His uncle, Abdel Khalil, who keeps the restaurant's books, feared they would be executed. None could understand exactly why they were being held, having only been told they were material witnesses.

"Witnesses for who? Witnesses for what?" Albasti said he thought to himself.

They learned later that a lover's quarrel had done them in. The wife of fellow detainee Fathy Saleh Abdelkalek, apparently in anger, told the FBI that her husband was suicidal and had planned to die in a crash. Authorities took it seriously.

It turned out not to be true, and when the man was released, he returned to Egypt along with one of the other men. The six who remained tried to put the incident behind them. But it kept dogging them. Returning from a recent trip to Egypt, one man was held in the airport for five hours because his name came up in the computer as being under federal investigation. One was turned down for an apartment for the same reason. All have had a cloud over their heads.

So when the meeting at the mosque was announced, they attended, hoping to get answers. Albasti's in-laws (one a lawyer and the other a writer) had argued all along that the material witness statute designed to compel testimony from frightened or uncooperative witnesses had been misused to hold people indefinitely. The meeting was a way to get answers.

"I expected nothing but heightened blood pressure," said Carolyn Baugh, Albasti's wife.

But they got an apology.

"They were wrongly accused," FBI Agent Fuentes said in a later interview. "They have almost lost their business. This is something that has affected them in every possible way. Anybody being accused falsely of something that serious is like a teacher being accused of molesting a child. It's hard to come back from that. You can see . . . months later, the tears are still ready to flow."

Even so, Fuentes said the FBI had no choice. "Action had to be taken," he said. "I did not apologize that the FBI was forced to take them into custody. That was something that had to be done."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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