FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida, 14 September 2003 — Two Canadian Islamic leaders were denied entry into the United States after a federal agent told them they picked the wrong day — Sept. 11 — to fly, an Islamic civil rights group said.
When Ahmed Kutty, 59, and Sheikh Abdul Hamid, 37, were stopped Thursday at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, agents found a business card for an Islamic organization on one of the men, said Altaf Ali, executive director of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“One of the agents told them, ‘You guys have picked the wrong time to fly,”’ Ali said.
One of the agents told the imams that the US government had reason to believe the organization on the business card was tied to terrorism, Ali said. The organization was not immediately identified.
The men were detained for 16 hours at the airport and later jailed before taking a flight back to Toronto on Friday, Ali said.
“I’m totally flabbergasted,” Ali said. “Someone can be detained and locked up for several hours just because of a business card — that is so un-American.”
Barbara Gonzalez, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection in southern Florida, said that the two men were found inadmissible on security grounds. She said that because of privacy concerns, the government would not publicly disclose the security grounds.
Once told they had been found inadmissible, the men “voluntarily withdrew their request for entry, so they are not barred from returning,” Gonzalez said.
The imams had flown to Fort Lauderdale on their way to Orlando, where they had planned to raise money for an Islamic school in Canada, Ali said.
