Terror Case ‘Painful’ to Detroit Arab Americans

DETROIT —  While the U.S. government builds its case that four Detroit-area Arab men allegedly conspired to engage in a “global jihad,” or Islamic holy war, leaders of the country’s largest Arab American community expressed concern that the move is forcing Arab Americans to continue to live under a cloud of suspicion.

The U.S. attorney’s office claims that the men were involved in planning attacks here and abroad, produced fake IDs for themselves and others, and took jobs at Detroit’s international airport to have access to passenger jetliners.

But the government “has failed to prove one single case to the American public, and it is very hard to swallow these allegations as a community,” said Imad Hamad, Midwest regional director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Dearborn, Mich., a suburb of Detroit with a large Arab American population.

“Any closed hearings where people are denied the basic opportunity of legal counsel to help them deal with serious allegations of that nature continue to be questionable,” Hamad said in an interview.

The U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI said Wednesday that a grand jury--an impaneled body that hears evidence behind closed doors--had returned indictments against the four men on charges of conspiracy to support terrorists, and of producing and misusing fraudulent visas and other identification documents. Three of the men are in custody and the fourth, whose full name is not known, is still at large.

The indictments, which came nearly a year after the three now in jail were arrested the week after the Sept. 11 attacks, sparked renewed concern that Arab American communities are still viewed with suspicion about having ties to terrorism.

About 200,000 people of Arab descent live in the Detroit area, where the heaviest concentration is in Dearborn, about 12 miles west of downtown Detroit.

“There is a feeling in our community of being a victim, which is a painful experience after Sept. 11,” said Mohammad Ali Elahi, the founding imam of the mosque at the Islamic House of Wisdom Dearborn Heights, which adjoins Dearborn.

Prisoners in American jails come from all varieties of ethnic communities, “but if any happen to be an Arab person, there is a rush to judgment that there is a terrorist connection,” he said. “We need to reach out and build bridges for better dialogue among different communities.”

The indictment identifies the four men as Karim Koubriti and Ahmad Hannan, originally from Morocco; Algerian-born Farouk Ali-Haimoud, and a man known only as Abdella, whose age and background are not known.

The men operated as a “covert underground support unit for terrorist attacks” and conspired to provide “material support and resources” for carrying out assaults against the U.S. air base in Incirlik, Turkey, a hospital in Amman, Jordan, and targets in the U.S.

They “were involved in plans to obtain weaponry to benefit operatives overseas, to recruit persons for violent activity, to arrange for the entry of recruits into the United States where they would be trained for global jihad, and to arrange false identification to facilitate such entry and training.”

The men moved into an apartment together in Dearborn in June 2001, along with an unidentified individual they tried to recruit “to participate in the global jihad against states that were not sufficiently Islamic”--namely Jordan, Turkey and the United States. They also wanted the unnamed individual to bring in other members to the cell, according to the government’s case.

Although the unnamed person is identified only as “an individual” repeatedly in the U.S. attorney’s charges, it is believed to be Youssef Hmimssa, who is named on the first page of the indictment but was not charged along with the other four. Ali-Haimoud’s attorney, Kevin Ernst, said in interviews with local newspapers this week that the government built its case on the allegations of “one snitch”--Hmimssa--who is accusing the others to protect himself.

Ernst, who did not return phone calls Friday seeking comment, was quoted as saying that federal agents had built a bogus case out of desperation to show progress in the fight against terrorism as the first anniversary of last year’s attacks neared.

Ernst’s comments are “purposefully inflammatory; it’s intended to inflame the citizenry,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard Convertino, the government’s chief prosecutor in the case who signed the indictment.

The accusations of ethnic profiling are “unwarranted, uncalled for and absolutely without merit,” he said. “The efforts undertaken nationally speak for themselves,” Convertino said, declining to comment further, citing a gag rule issued by U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen.

Lawyers for Hannan and Hmimssa did not return phone calls Friday seeking comment.

Hannan, Koubriti and Ali-Haimoud traveled frequently to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, “where they attempted to locate security breaches that would allow them to, among other things, directly access airliners,” the indictment says. From May to July of last year, Hannan and Koubriti worked for a vendor at the airport, and Ali-Haimoud worked at an airport store from February to April of this year, it says.

The three disguised their plans by using a “mentally unstable man” to sign notebooks containing sketches of the U.S. base in Turkey and the hospital in Jordan to make it appear that the notebooks belonged to him.

Throughout this period, they acted on orders from Abdella, who instructed them to communicate in code, according to the indictment.

Federal agents raided the apartment of the three on Sept. 17, less than a week after the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and found among other items a videotape “that appears to depict surveillance of such U.S. landmarks” as Disneyland in Anaheim and the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, the U.S. says.

Arab Americans in the Detroit area have complained that they have been subject to unjustified suspicion since September, saying they have been singled out because of their ethnicity at airport security lines or by police making traffic stops.

However, anti-discrimination activist Hamad praised the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI, with whom he meets every month along with representatives of U.S. customs, the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms--meetings that Hamad says have greatly improved relations between the Arab American community and local authorities.

John Bell Jr., the head of Detroit’s FBI office, even visited Hamad recently to congratulate him on his swearing-in next month as a U.S. citizen, bringing a souvenir FBI cap, key chain and coffee mug.

“We must not have the community surrender to fear and intimidation,” Hamad said. “But John Bell has been very candid, and that’s the true American way.”