DHAKA, 11 April 2005 — Bangladesh is trying to verify the identity of a teenage girl, said to be a Bangladeshi, who was arrested in New York, a senior official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in Dhaka yesterday.
According to newspaper reports, two 16-year-old girls from New York City, one a Bangladeshi and the other a Guinean, were arrested in March and later charged with immigration violation after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asserted that they intended to become suicide bombers.
When his attention was drawn to newspaper reports, the Foreign Ministry official said they were trying to ascertain the facts. The girl arrested in New York might not be a true Bangladeshi, he added.
Brought up in the US, she might be a Bangladesh-born American citizen. “The passport that she carries will be examined”, the official said.
Meanwhile, the hearing of the girl, now under US custody, has been adjourned to next Thursday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents had discovered the suicide-bombing plot on a computer records of Internet chats between the girls. The family and friends of the Bangladeshi girl called the allegations absurd.
Though a hearing in the Bangladeshi girl’s case was due on Friday in York, Pennsylvania, the US government has asked that it be closed, based on a motion by Krista Stanton, supervisory special agent in the counter-terrorism section of the FBI’s New York office.
The case underscores the difficulties faced by anyone who is charged only with civil immigration violations, but is in fact being held in a counter-terrorism investigation, lawyers said.
There are no firm time limits on immigration detention, so the burden is on the girls to prove that they are not potential suicide bombers, rather than on the US government to prove they are.
At Heritage High School in East Harlem, teachers and classmates of the Guinean girl, now also in detention, expressed outrage at her detention.
