Five Arrested Americans in Pakistan Face Deportation
Five young Americans will be deported over alleged terrorist links, a local police chief said today.
The men admitted to investigators they tried to connect with al-Qaida-linked militant groups in Pakistani and were planning on crossing the border in Afghanistan in order to fight U.S. troops.
All five men were said to have used the social networking site Facebook and video networking site, YouTube to try to connect with extremist groups in Pakistan. As soon as they arrived in Pakistan, they continued the same efforts, according to the Associated Press.
But it was their own families that reported them missing in Washington, D.C. a week ago when one of them left a video that showcased graphic war scenes and uttered the words, “Muslims must be defended.”
Police have said those detained included three Pakistani Americans, two Ethiopian Americans and an Egyptian American named Ramy Zamzam who is a dental student at Howard University. The others were identified as Waqar Hussain Khan, Umer Farooq, Ahmad Abdul Minni and Aman Hassan Yamer. Pakistani officials have given various versions of their names and the spellings could not be confirmed.
All five men were detained this week, Pakistani police said. Along with one of the men’s fathers — in Sargodha, a town in the eastern province of Punjab.
Pakistan regional police chief Javed Islam the men will most likely be deported since they have yet to charge them with any crime. There is no word on how long Pakistan police can hold suspects before releasing them as of yet.
However, all five men are being heavily interrogated, according to a senior government official in Punjab. The official said the legal process could take weeks to complete.
“They are under investigation. We need to establish their links,” Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah told The Associated Press. “We are getting information that they had plans to travel to the tribal areas. We need to know which people they wanted to see and what their contacts were.”
Due to privacy laws, details on the visit the men received while in custody from U.S. officials, including some from the FBI, have not been disclosed. However, a member from the interrogating team said they were being questioned in five separate cells. The same man has reported to the Associated Press that all men are in good health and “are eating.”
This case has added to the fear that Americans and other Westerners — especially those of Pakistani descent — are traveling to Pakistan to join up with al-Qaida and other militant groups. The charges surfaced just on the heels of the charges against a Chicago man of Pakistani origin who is accused of surveying targets for the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.
