WASHINGTON/TUCSON — Saudi citizen Muhammad Al-Qudhaieen, a former University of Arizona graduate student, has been deported to the Kingdom without charges, reports here say. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Phoenix confirmed that Al-Qudhaieen had returned to Saudi Arabia, but federal immigration officials did not return calls, according to the Associated Press.
Deedra Abboud, of CAIR in Phoenix, said she was told Al-Qudhaieen had recently been deported without charges. He called a friend in Tucson after arriving in Saudi Arabia, Abboud told the Arizona Daily Star.
With this the more than two-month-long ordeal of Al-Qudhaieen ends as it began — mysteriously. He had been held in federal custody in Virginia since June.
The Muslim community in the state of Arizona had been seeking answers about the weeks-long detention of the Saudi citizen, a father of five and a linguistics scholar at the University of Arizona.
Al-Qudhaieen’s wife, friends and Islamic leaders had been unable to get any information about his detention except that he was being held as a material witness. Federal officials have still not disclosed specifically why Al-Qudhaieen was detained.
What emerges from the little that is known about this case is that Al-Qudhaieen could have been deemed guilty by association.
Al-Qudhaieen was an acquaintance of Zakaria Soubra, an Arizona student who was named in a pre-Sept. 11 FBI memo written by Kenneth Williams, a Phoenix FBI agent. The memo warned that Al-Qaeda could be training terrorist pilots in the United States.
Arrested on a visa violation, Soubra was deported to Lebanon in May after testifying to a federal grand jury in Virginia. Soubra, who was given immunity for his testimony, has never been charged.
In a recent phone interview from Beirut, Soubra said he was questioned about Al-Qudhaieen and added he did not have any connections to terrorists, did not know anything about the attacks and said the FBI had ruined his life. In 1999, Al-Qudhaieen and Hamdan Al-Shalawi, an Arizona State University student, were handcuffed and removed from an America West flight at the Columbus, Ohio, airport because of complaints by a flight attendant.
