State: Terror sweep a battle of rights and safety

A Pakistani gas station attendant who renewed his driver's license 23 minutes before one of the Sept. 11 hijackers got his license at the same motor vehicle office in Lauderdale Lakes.

A Saudi Arabian student in Tampa who allegedly peered at planes through a rifle scope.

They are among the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of foreigners who have been swept up in Florida in the hunt for terrorists since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

A few of the suspects turned out to be innocents, there by chance.

Some were detained after their behavior sent up red flags, but many were jailed -- and in some cases are still there -- on relatively minor charges.

And so far at least, none has been accused of a terrorism-related crime.

The detention campaign, the largest roundup of aliens since World War II, has been veiled in secrecy. The Justice Department won't provide many details about who was or is being held, why and where.

Civil rights groups and lawyers argue that many of the detainees are guilty of nothing more than routine immigration violations. They contend that the government's attempt to hold them indefinitely amounts to a trampling of human rights.

Attorney General John Ashcroft counters that the detentions are constitutional and necessary. He denies ethnicity plays a role in the campaign to find terrorists.

"The Department of Justice is waging a deliberate campaign of arrest and detention to protect American lives. We're removing terrorists who violate the law from our streets to prevent further terrorists attack," Ashcroft said in November.

To assess the fallout from the crackdown, the St. Petersburg Times surveyed more than 100 cases of foreigners picked up in Florida after the Sept. 11 attacks. Most were Middle Easterners who lived or worked in the state. Reporters identified them through federal documents, newspaper reports, jail logs in some of Florida's 67 counties and interviews with lawyers and law enforcement officials.

The cases, ranging from the serious to the frivolous, show how dramatically the legal ground has shifted since Sept. 11.

The attacks exposed serious gaps in law enforcement in Florida, home to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. Those gaps helped at least 12 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers move around the state freely, some on expired visas.

Determined to plug the holes, law enforcement officials now use "every constitutional tool to keep suspected terrorists locked up," Ashcroft says.

Numbers a mystery

Nationwide, the Justice Department says, 460 people remain in custody on immigration violations and are under investigation for terrorist connections. The department won't name them or say how many of those detentions are Florida-related.

Ashcroft also has identified 116 suspects facing federal criminal charges that grew out of the Sept. 11 investigation but have nothing to do with terrorism. They include eight indicted in Florida and three others with Florida ties.

But the list omits other suspects, including two whose files have been sealed at the request of prosecutors in Miami and more than 50 people with Florida ties identified as possible terrorism witnesses. Among them: a Saudi Arabian language student with the e-mail address Last-Day-11.

Ashcroft's list also doesn't include at least two men who were detained and labeled material witnesses.

One of them, Ahmed Badawi, an Orlando travel agent born in Egypt, was wrongly accused and freed after three days in jail.

The other, Jean-Tony Antoine Oulai, is being held. A citizen of the Ivory Coast who came to the United States on a student visa in 1988, he moved to Daytona Beach in the early 1990s to attend Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and earn a pilot's license. He then worked on and off as a cargo pilot, said his brother, Dr. Andre Oulai, a Michigan surgeon.

Three days after the attacks, the FBI stopped Tony Oulai at the airport in Jacksonville as he tried to board a commercial plane. In his checked luggage, authorities said, they found a stun gun, a copy of the Koran and videos about the FBI and the CIA, according to his former lawyer, Robert Kolken.

Oulai, 34, a black belt, denied knowing the hijackers or having links to terrorists. A stun gun is permitted in checked baggage, and the literature he had is apparently widely available on the Internet, his brother said. "This was a child who was a wimp," he said.

On Nov. 15, an immigration judge ordered Tony Oulai deported for overstaying his visa. But instead of releasing him, prosecutors switched gears and decided they needed him as a material witness to testify before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va.

"They mislabeled my brother an Arab, and they mislabeled the Ivory Coast an Islamic country," Andre Oulai said. "He doesn't even know how to spell Afghanistan."

While detained in Buffalo, N.Y., Tony Oulai was put in isolation and, according to his brother, the guards wouldn't let him shave, apparently because they wanted him to look like a Muslim fundamentalist. Oulai is Roman Catholic.

Circumstantial cases

Prosecutors have presented circumstantial evidence linking several detainees to terrorism.

On Sept. 16, police say, they found Nabil Sarama, 52, near an Orlando telephone booth that had been used to make bomb threats. A search of his suitcase turned up expired visas, eight different drivers' licenses and a kit to make up to 12 box cutters like the ones used by the hijackers five days before.

In a complaint filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif., Immigration and Naturalization Service special agent Thomas Orecchia said Sarama entered the United States through at least five airports in a seven-year span on passports issued by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.

Sarama, a Palestinian, is being held on false statement charges because he allegedly lied on his application for legal residence in the United States. He denies any connection to terrorism and needed the box cutters because he worked in a liquor store, an unidentified relative told the San Jose Mercury News.

Besides Sarama, federal agents in Florida have identified a handful of suspects who used fake identity scams similar to those of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Federal and local officers also have broken up a number of credit card fraud schemes like those used by terrorists in the past. And in other cases, the Justice Department says, it has generated leads that will prove helpful in the war against terrorism.

In Miami, prosecutors charged a couple with smuggling Egyptians and other aliens into New Jersey.

In Jacksonville, the Secret Service unraveled an international check-cashing scheme run by Kourosh Ziaee, who is suspected of being a money launderer from Iran nicknamed "The Ghost."

In Tampa, Omar Mohammed Quran of Jordan pleaded guilty to using 18 different American Express cards to make 29 fraudulent purchases worth $94,854 at an Orlando jewelry store over a three-week period.

His lawyer, Louis Rosenthal of New York City, calls his client a "lovable con man," not a terrorist. He won't say if Quran is cooperating with the FBI on possible terrorist associations.

Tenuous connections

A large group of detainees was arrested on federal and state charges that would have gone unnoticed before Sept. 11.

For example, Abdulaziz Alomary, a former St. Petersburg resident from Saudi Arabia, was picked up for one reason: His name is almost identical to that of Abdulaziz Alomari, a hijacker who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when it struck the north tower of the World Trade Center.

After he was stopped at Miami International Airport on his way to Denver, FBI agents quickly became convinced he couldn't be the same Alomari aboard the hijacked flight.

But when they ran his name through a computer, they discovered an old misdemeanor warrant for his arrest. He had violated probation on a 1995 DUI conviction by moving from St. Petersburg to Saudi Arabia without telling his probation officer.

The FBI turned him over to Pinellas County sheriff's deputies, who locked the frightened suspect in isolation for two weeks for his protection.

At a hearing in Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court, a prosecutor asked for a six-month sentence. Alomary's attorney, Bruce Udolf, objected.

"Have we completely lost our reason because of this tragic event?" Udolf says now. "This guy couldn't terrorize a mouse. The only reason he was being treated that way was because he was an Arab."

Udolf, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky cases, prevailed. Alomary took the first available flight back to Riyadh.

Other detainees aren't so lucky. Dozens with Florida connections are being held on immigration infractions that would have been handled with a simple telephone call before Sept. 11.

Now, all the government needs to jail them indefinitely is the most slender connection to terrorism. Some examples:

An Egyptian is being held on a visa violation because he allegedly made a plane reservation on the same Kinko's computer terminal in Broward County as one of the hijackers.

A 57-year-old Virginia woman was locked up because her 22-year-old Egyptian husband thought about attending flight school in Florida. There was also a rumor that he might have known a terrorist. Both were charged with lying to INS agents for saying they lived in Virginia when they lived in Florida. She pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was released. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served. But he is being held as the government seeks to deport him.

Muhammad Mubeen, a 28-year-old Pakistani gas station attendant, is being held, his lawyers say, because he renewed his driver's license at the state motor vehicle office in Lauderdale Lakes 23 minutes before hijacker Mohamed Atta got a license. Mubeen admitted to a judge he is in this country illegally but denied knowing anything about terrorism.

Evidence crumbles

The FBI has lost interest in other suspects.

In Tampa, federal investigators detained four Jordanians on immigration violations after getting a tip that they might be part of an al-Qaida cell, said Neil Lewis, an attorney for Nasri Al Hamdan, one of the detainees.

"They thought they found the mother lode in Tampa," Lewis said sarcastically.

Then, as part of the broader post-Sept. 11 crackdown on immigrants, the Justice Department charged the four with a rarely enforced crime: entering into sham marriages with Americans so they could remain in the United States. The Americans posing as the "spouses" admitted being paid between $150 and $200 a month.

Al Hamdan and the others vehemently denied ties to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups, and it turned out there were none.

"We have no reason to believe that they're involved in terrorist activities," said Steve Cole, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office.

But they are in jail.

One of those prisoners, 26-year-old Nermine Hani Ayoub Al Khammash, has gotten frail and pasty in jail as she waits to be deported.

Shackled, wearing an orange jumpsuit, she stood before Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich one day last month in U.S. District Court in Tampa. Through an Arabic interpreter, she wept as she pleaded guilty to getting married to stay in the United States.

"I just want this case over with," she said. "I want to go home."

Prosecutor Anthony Portelli said he didn't object to her immediate deportation. But a federal probation officer persuaded the judge to delay her release until a presentence investigation was completed.

"It really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to hold this woman," her lawyer, Daniel Daly, said after the hearing. "She has nothing to do with anything. If people in the Middle East want instances to deride the United States, this is one they'd be pointing to."

The immigration hold gives the government time to investigate if a detainee knows anything about terrorism. But in some cases, immigration judges have ordered people once considered prime suspects sent home because prosecutors lacked evidence to hold them.

In Hillsborough County, two brothers from Saudi Arabia at first aroused serious suspicion.

According to an INS report, Yaser Al Shaya, who had been studying English, became "evasive" when his apartment manager asked questions about his rental application.

A Hillsborough sheriff's deputy arrested the man's older brother, identified as Abdullah Bin Shayea. He was "was one of two subjects that was reported to be observing airplanes through a rifle scope as the airplanes were about to land at Tampa International Airport," an INS report states.

Udolf, who was hired by the Saudi Embassy to defend some of the detainees, said most of the allegations in the reports were exaggerated or untrue. "He didn't have any rifle and his brother wasn't with him. He was standing inside the door of his apartment with a little periscope, and they lived at least a 20-minute ride away from the airport."

Prosecutors had sought to deport the men. But the immigration judge, declining to rely on the government's allegations, allowed them to leave the country voluntarily, with an escort.

Hillsborough Sheriff Cal Henderson says he is unfamiliar with that case. Since Sept. 11, he says, his deputies have done more "suspicion stops," in which they stop or eyeball people who look suspicious. But Henderson says they don't use ethnic profiling or stop anyone without cause.

Even after a judge orders their removal from the country, detainees sometimes languish in overcrowded county jails or high-security wings of federal lockups.

Some complain that guards taunt prisoners of Middle Eastern background. Others say they have little access to friends and families. And no one seems able to tell them when they might go home.

Zuhair Alqahtani, a former flight student in Florida, was picked up with his wife in their Winter Park home on Oct. 18 for overstaying their visitors' visas.

Alqahtani, 31, gave the agents access to everything. They found a photograph of a Saudi Arabian airliner with a seating chart. In his address book, they noticed he listed a friend named Ahmed Alghamdi, a pilot with the same name as a hijacker.

Alqahtani said that there were at least 1,000 Ahmed Alghamdis in Saudi Arabia and that his friend had no connection to the attacks. The FBI continued to dig. Agents questioned him about Mazen Al-Najjar, the former University of South Florida instructor whom they suspect of terrorist ties. Alqahtani acknowledged paying Al-Najjar $200 to translate his high school diploma from Arabic.

"Zuhair didn't object to answering any of their questions," says John Lauro, his lawyer in Tampa. "He thought they were entirely reasonable. He just wanted his wife out of jail."

They never questioned her. Hanadi Hababeh, a Syrian teacher, had never been inside a cell before, and at the Miami-Dade County jail, she became sick. The guards didn't attend to her back problem properly, Lauro says, and also made her take off her headscarf in public areas.

Eventually, Alqahtani's explanations cleared away the FBI's suspicions. The couple agreed to abandon their application to become U.S. citizens and leave the country. But after an immigration judge ordered their voluntary departure to Saudi Arabia, their release was delayed for several weeks.

It was only after representatives of the Saudi Embassy intervened that the couple was freed. They left the country Jan. 6.

Guilty at first sight?

On a Sunday morning in November, three young Iraqi men, all legal refugees in this country, were driving over the Port of Miami-Dade bridge in a rented Taurus with Michigan plates.

They told a security guard they wanted to visit a friend working as a cruise ship waiter. The suspicious guard called police, and soon the Iraqis were surrounded by seven squad cars. They were searched and turned over to federal authorities for questioning.

The men, who fled persecution at the hands of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, had passed an asylum screening when they arrived from Cyprus in August 2000. Now they found themselves explaining to the FBI that they were not terrorists.

The FBI won't comment on what it calls an ongoing investigation, but two South Florida newspapers have reported that the men have been cleared of any connection to terrorism.

Even so, Ali Jawdat, Hushar Rashman and Cameran Sadeq might not only lose their refugee status. They may be deported to the "prison" they fled.

The Iraqis -- two Kurds and a Shiite Muslim -- are charged with helping their Latvian friend enter the country illegally, a charge they deny. The friend, Inna Tristjanicka, was detained by the INS that day and deported.

"We came here looking for freedom," Rashman said in a telephone interview from Krome Detention Center. "Sept. 11 was a tragedy for us. Now we are put in another prison where they give us bad looks and bad words."

At Krome and other detention centers in Miami-Dade, the three men are among dozens of Middle Eastern asylum seekers whose release is being blocked, said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Miami-based Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. Before Sept. 11, they would have been released, she said.

Government officials say their asylum policy hasn't changed since Sept. 11. INS bases releases on the case, not on a person's ethnicity or nationality.

But the Iraqis say they have watched detainees from Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Colombia and other places come and go. They say there is one reason they are in jail: They speak English with an Arabic accent.

-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett and staff writers Leanora Minai, Alicia Caldwell, Cary Davis, Jamie Jones and Carrie Johnson contributed to this report.

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