Homeland Security will review detention of Spanish Muslim woman (Florida)

[seafan]

I am just fed up with the gestapo tactics of *Homeland Security*. When we take power in November, I hope this department and its name are dissolved, as it will forever be a reminder of the shameful bigotry, hatred and intolerance that it pushed onto good and decent people. We deserve better than this.


Homeland Security will review detention of Spanish Muslim woman

The Associated Press
April 13, 2006

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will review the treatment of an Iraqi-born Muslim woman who was forced to remove her hijab and strip-searched while being detained after she was barred from entering the country, officials for an American Muslim civil rights group said Thursday.
Safana Jawad, 45, a Spanish citizen, arrived Tuesday at Tampa International Airport from Spain and had planned to visit her 16-year-old son, who lives with his father in Pinellas County. She flew back to Spain on Thursday evening without seeing her son, her ex-husband, Ahmad Maki Kubba, 49, told the St. Petersburg Times.

Federal officials declined to comment about Jawad. In an interview the newspaper published Wednesday, Jawad said that federal agents told her she could not enter the country because she was connected to someone considered "suspicious."
"It was a nightmare, and now it's over," said Kubba, a former political prisoner in Iraq who was lauded in Gov. Jeb Bush's 2005 State of the State speech. "But it's caused permanent damage that will be left forever."

snip

Jawad was interrogated for more than six hours before being fingerprinted and placed in a maximum security jail cell at the Pinellas County jail, Kubba and officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations said at a news conference in Clearwater.
She was singled out from other passengers on her flight because she was wearing the Islamic head scarf, said Ahmed Bedier, director of CAIR in Tampa.

snip

She was strip-searched to ensure that she had no weapons or contraband, and she declined to borrow a scarf from a chaplain after her head scarf was taken because it had metal barrettes. Bordner said.

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060413/APN/604131177