Sher Singh at his employer’s in 2001, formerly Electronic Data Systems, since acquired by Hewlett-Packard, in Virginia.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL / Gretchen Ertl

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Providence police lead Sher Singh in handcuffs away from the Amtrak train station in Providence on Sept. 12, 2001. He was making his way home from Boston to Virginia.

AP / STEW MILNE

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Sher Singh, a Sikh, shown in 2001, promotes interfaith understanding.

JOURNAL / KATHY BORCHERS

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The day after the 9/11 attacks, Sher Singh was making his way from Boston to his home in Virginia when his train made a brief stop at Providence Station — where a phalanx of police and FBI agents armed with bomb-sniffing dogs yanked him out and interrogated him for several hours.

Largely because some people had seen him at South Station with an untrimmed beard and green turban, nervous agents had wondered if he, too, might be one of those terrorists — though the ceremonial dagger he wore would show he was a Sikh, not a Muslim.

Even though he was released the same day, the interrogation helped propel Singh, then 27, into the national spotlight as one of the first people in the wake of 9/11 to be arrested because of ethnic and religious profiling.

The irony: the once-suspected terrorist has, for many years now, held a top-secret government clearance and visits some of the most secure military bases in the country, advising Navy and Marine leaders on the use of the latest computer technology.

Reached at his home in Frederick, Md., where he was interviewed by phone with his 3-year-old son bouncing on his lap, Singh said he holds no grudge against the agents who pulled him off the train that day nearly 10 years ago.

“In situations where you have gone through some horrific events, it is possible to make an error in judgment,” he

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