Suicide attacks are all too familiar to Sivakumar Muthiah. He fled his country, Sri Lanka, for the US more than four years ago. There, he says he witnessed two suicide bombings and a bomb attack in Colombo, his country's capital.
But nothing could prepare him for Sept. 11. The horror of that day is etched in his memory. It was a call to duty. He will now do whatever is asked of him to prevent terrorism.
A computer programmer, Mr. Muthiah contracts for the US Department of Labor and was at work in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston that morning. His boss said the building was being evacuated. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and there was talk of a terrorist attack.
"I thought that this maybe was an accident. And then when I came home I watched the television. And then I'm totally very upset. I suffered a lot," he says. It didn't take long for the news to spread to his parents, still in Sri Lanka. "Right away my mother and father called me from my country and they asked me 'What's going on?'"
Muthiah had been at the World Trade Center in New York a year before the attacks and had taken photographs of the buildings. "I'm very upset about [the deaths]. I'd seen… suicide bombings in Sri Lanka. But this was the worst thing I had ever seen."
He says that immediately after the attacks many of his American colleagues and even someone he had regarded as a close friend distanced themselves from him.
"After the Sept. 11 attack a lot of people [didn't know] who did this," he says. "Everybody started to suspect those people coming from foreign countries. People from Sri Lanka, India, anywhere.… I'm not angry with them because they don't [know] who are the real terrorists and who are the innocent people. If they knew it, they' [would] never treat us like that."
The events also stirred another change, this one from within. Muthiah, who hopes to become a citizen within a year or two, considered seriously for the first time his duty to the country in which he now lives. "I have to do something for [the] United States. That's a thing I keep in my mind. If they ask for information about any organization or anything, I'll help with whatever they're asking. Otherwise I'm doing nothing [for the] country in which I'm living. That's my duty."
– Steven Savides, photo by Stuart S. Cox Jr.
