State: Detention sours American dream

[AP photo]
Nacer Mustafa: "There's not even anything that could restore the dignity I lost that day."

Nacer Mustafa and his wife don't go out much these days.

He doesn't feel comfortable hanging out with friends at their favorite lounge in LaBelle, the small southwest Florida town where he lives.

He says he can't shake the feeling that he's being watched, and he doesn't know if he'll ever stop looking over his shoulder -- especially at airports.

When federal agents arrested Mustafa and his father at the Houston airport Sept. 15, 2001, on suspicion that he might be a terrorist traveling on a fake passport, he thought it was a joke.

It took only hours to realize how serious the situation was. The natural-born U.S. citizen spent 67 days in a Texas jail, allowed no visitors but his attorney, before the government said he did nothing wrong and let him go.

"It literally haunts me. I feel like this is going to follow me for the rest of my life," said Mustafa, 29, who found himself caught up in the net of what U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft dubbed "the largest, most comprehensive criminal investigation in world history."

"There's not even anything that could restore the dignity I lost that day," Mustafa said. "I never thought this could happen in the United States."

Mustafa said he is now in the habit of carrying court documents attesting to his innocence and newspaper clippings about his travails in case authorities ever question him about that September day a year ago.

On that day he and his father were headed home to Florida after a short business trip in Mexico. Their troubles began when they landed for a stopover at Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport four days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Any other day, the U.S. Customs officers' inspection of the leather belts and boots the Mustafas had purchased to sell in their department store in Hendry County would have been routine. But the attacks made U.S. Customs agents especially wary when Mustafa presented a cracked and worn passport at the airport checkpoint.

The fact that Mustafa had been arrested three years earlier after Texas police found more than $100,000 cash in a rental car he was driving didn't help either. Mustafa said he was traveling with the cash for business reasons. He was cleared of wrongdoing when the money laundering charges were dismissed in 1998, according to his attorney Dan Gerson.

Mustafa said he is convinced those facts would have gone undetected if the customs agents hadn't heard him speaking Arabic with his father, Fathi Mustafa, 67, that day.

"My father sometimes is hard of hearing, so I was telling him in Arabic what they were saying. One of the customs people came over and said, 'What language are you speaking?' I said, 'Arabic.' Then they took our passports and took us upstairs to a room."

For the next four hours, Mustafa said he explained repeatedly to the federal agents in the stuffy airport security room that he was a U.S. citizen by birth. He told the FBI agent with the dark blue suit and the somber look that his father was a naturalized American citizen who emigrated to Florida from Palestine nearly 40 years ago.

Unlike Mustafa, many of roughly 1,200 people arrested in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were noncitizens. Many waited months before they were deported on immigration charges, according to an August 2002 report on the arrests prepared by Human Rights Watch. Seventy-three of the people named as "persons of special interest" in the federal investigation still are being held in prisons around the country though in almost all the cases the government has not charged them with having direct connection to the attacks, according to government reports.

Although Mustafa's father was released several weeks before him because of health problems, Mustafa worried about how the elderly man coped with solitary confinement in a tiny cell.

"The only thing I could hear was my father crying in the room next to me," Mustafa said. "He'd never spent a day in jail in his life. He was in very bad shape."

Since his release after nearly two weeks in jail, Mustafa's father has received treatment for a weak heart. Mustafa said he's convinced his father's time in prison worsened his already poor health.

He also worries that his daughters may never understand what happened. Mustafa's youngest daughter, Jenin, was only about 7 months old when her father suddenly disappeared. His oldest, Diana, was 4.

"When I first got out of jail, we were sitting next to each other on the couch, you know, watching TV and she asked me 'What is jail?' I didn't know how to answer her," Mustafa said.

After the FBI crime lab analyzed Mustafa's passports and tests for tampering came back negative the United States Attorney in Houston dismissed the charges against the Mustafas on Nov. 20. Mustafa was released from jail the next day and his father was allowed to remove the electronic ankle bracelet the court had forced him to wear.

Mustafa said the ailing economy and news of his arrest in his rural hometown fueled a downturn in sales at his gas station mini-market and his father's store.

"I lost a lot of money in the store here. I'm trying to get back on my feet," he said.

A federal court denied Mustafa and his father compensation for $40,000 in legal fees in a lawsuit brought by their attorney in January.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas wrote in her May ruling that the government was justified by special circumstances when agents arrested the Mustafas.

"Both men were accorded due process of the law, and the government's good faith was demonstrated by its prompt motion to dismiss the charge against Mustafa," said Nancy G. Herrera, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Houston.

Mustafa said he tries not to let his disillusionment overwhelm him. He said he was surprised when neighbors offered their support after his release.

"People would shake my hand and would tell me how bad they feel about what happened," Mustafa said. "Hopefully, the day will come when people will stand up and realize what happened after September 11th."

-- Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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