SAN DIEGO, 17 October — Saudi businessman Saeed ibn Omar Al-Mortan Al-Ghamdi said police in Denmark treated him like a terrorist when they discovered his name was similar to that of one of the suspects — Saeed Al-Ghamdi — involved in the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. "They took me in an armored car to the police station. They threw the copy of the Holy Qur’an on the ground while searching my bag and put me in a solitary cell," Al-Ghamdi told Okaz newspaper. He added that they did not allow him to contact the Saudi Embassy in Copenhagen.
Mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims, especially Saudis, has become a daily occurrence in the United States and Europe, despite assurances by top government officials that they are being protected.
A report carried by Los Angeles Times on Monday proved the growing cases of harassment targeting Saudis.
US Attorney General John Ashcroft pledged yesterday that his department would investigate the complaints regarding harassment and torture of detainees. He said probes were under way in 1,700 cases of violence, mostly against Arabs and Muslims.
Hussein Sadruddin, head of a Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Dallas, said that detainees are being targeted because they are Middle Easterners. "People are going after these detainees because it gives them a false sense of doing something for their country," he said. "A Saudi is being held in Denton, Texas. He was kept in leg irons while meeting with his family. They didn’t give him a cup to drink from or a mattress to sleep on. They didn’t give him a blanket. He asked what time of day it was so he could pray toward Makkah, but they wouldn’t tell him. He’s very frightened," says Paul Sultan, a Dallas attorney, who declined to identify his client except to say that he is in his 20s, works as a sales representative and faces only minor immigration charges. "This is not an isolated case in the United States," the Times reported. Inside US jails, some of the 700 people detained as part of the investigation into the terrorist attacks have endured beatings, have been denied access to lawyers and have otherwise been deprived of their rights.
A Saudi student of mathematics in San Diego, Yezid Al-Salimi, who was released last Tuesday, was thrown out of his flat in San Diego for no reason. He spent 17 days in prison as a "material witness".
The authorities did not allow him to call his relatives or friends. He was kept in a filthy cell in New York with bullying guards and was even denied the most basic hygienic requirements. He was not allowed to take bath or brush his teeth during the period he had spent in jail. "They called me a terrorist," he said. He was released when the authorities accepted that he had no links with the terrorist acts. He was interrogated for several hours repeatedly by FBI agents for his connections with one of the suspected hijacker, Nawaf Al-Hazmi. "The interrogators wanted to know if I had given money to Al-Hamzi. I told them I had not and asked them to check my bank account."
In New York, Mohammad Maddy, a former ticket-taker at John F. Kennedy International Airport, was picked up on Oct. 3. He was charged with sneaking his wife and children past security there on Sept. 10, the day before the terrorist strikes. He was injured by guards at the city’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
Meanwhile, Mihdar Abdullah, a Somali national of Yemeni origin, who was arrested by FBI agents as a material witness in the attack against the Pentagon, became a suspect yesterday in another case.
