Damra not heard from since his deportation

[OhioChick]

Monday, January 08, 2007

Four days after Imam Fawaz Damra was deported to the Middle East, family and friends still have not heard from the former leader of Ohio's largest mosque.

And today, friends fear Damra might have been detained some time between 4 and 5 a.m. Thursday, when the imam likely faced officials at an Israeli checkpoint while crossing the border to his Palestinian homeland.

"This is a complete mystery," said Isam Zaiem, chairman of the Cleveland Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "Normally it takes about 24 hours to hear from someone after they've been de ported. But it's as if the imam has van ished off the face of the Earth."

Bureau of Immi gration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Tim Counts said deportation officials typically ensure the deportee makes it safely to the final destination. But he could offer no certainties in Damra's case.

http://www.cleveland.com/damra/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/116824883439720.xml&coll=2

Hmmmm....Just vanished?

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. Disappearing people

is a state sanctioned form of terrorism.

[papau]

2. Once in bed with al-Qaida, becomming a good man doesn't stop deportation to the east side of Nablus

" directing all rifles at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews." Fawaz Damra, 1991"
http://www.cleveland.com/damra/index.ssf?/damra/more/11042001.html
"Fawaz Damra...helped found and lead a New York-based militant group that the U.S. government says Osama bin Laden later made a part of his global terror network - The Alkifah Refugee Center was set up by Damra and two other men in 1987 at a Brooklyn, N.Y., mosque. It recruited fighters for the Muslim holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, raising huge sums - by some accounts, millions of dollars - to support the Afghan jihad. Federal records also show it was the chief U.S. branch for the "Services Office" in Pakistan that bin Laden used to recruit Arab fighters for the Afghan war. When the holy war ended in early 1989, bin Laden didn't want to quit. He set up an organization, al-Qaida, to take the jihad, or holy war, worldwide. And he used the Alkifah structure of moving money and fighters to a network of training camps in Afghanistan to do it, a bin Laden defector testified in federal court this year. At the time, Damra was still an Alkifah officer and imam, or spiritual leader, of the al-Farooq mosque, where the center was based....on Nov. 2, 1991, Saud Assed, the son of a wealthy Libyan exile, was killed outside Damra's new mosque on Detroit Ave. in a case briefly investigated for links to the terror factions in New York. Shahaded Madahneh, the man convicted in that case, said he spent four years in Ohio prisons for a crime he didn't commit. He believes he was set up by people at Damra's Cleveland mosque who took advantage of his lack of English skills to implicate him in the crime."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House listed the Services Office and its branch "Al Kifah" among chief bin Laden-allied "charities" whose assets were frozen.... the Alkifah center with its powerful fund-raising apparatus and U.S. connections may have been more important...Bin Laden defector Jamal al-Fadl testified this year that when al-Qaida was set up in 1989, it was put under the "Farooq" structural umbrella - an apparent reference to the mosque and the Alkifah center - after bin Laden had a falling-out with his former mentor who ran the Services Office.

Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam (op note -who argued with Damra about whether money should go to terrorists in the West bank rather than to terrorists under BinLaden met with Damra - end of op note), was killed just months later in a November 1989 car bombing in Pakistan....The bare-knuckled fight among Arab ethnic factions to control the direction of jihad - and the vast sums it controlled - appears to have centered on Brooklyn. Damra represented Palestinian factions at the al-Farooq mosque. According to a videotape made at that time, Damra wanted to switch the focus to helping the intifada, or uprising, against Israel.

Others, including radical Egyptians and Yemenis who eventually ousted Damra from al-Farooq, wanted to use the struggle to push Islamic governance in their nations. Disagreements led to fisticuffs at the mosque and at New York airports. Damra himself was punched by an Egyptian cab driver named Mahmoud Abouhalima, later convicted of mixing the chemicals for the 1993 Trade Center bomb, when Damra refused to hand over a $1,000 check he had in his pocket, according to federal records.

The trail of violence may even have stretched to CleImam Abbas Ahmad of First Cleveland Mosque, acting leader of the Greater Cleveland Council of Mosques, said Damra has done "a great job" building bridges among Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities in the last decade.

"If God is willing to forgive a man for his sins, certainly we can forgive him, too," he said.

Others are less forgiving."



Seems a reformed bad guy was wrongly deported.

[Eugene]

3. (AP) Brother: Israel Arrested Deported Imam

Brother: Israel Arrested Deported Imam


Tuesday January 9, 2007 12:46 AM

By DAVID N. GOODMAN

Associated Press Writer

DETROIT (AP) - The former imam of Ohio's largest mosque, who was deported to his native
West Bank last week, was arrested by Israeli authorities after crossing from Jordan, his brother
said Monday.

Fawaz Damra, 47, had been jailed in Monroe County, Mich., for a year while awaiting
deportation for concealing his aid to Islamic Jihad - classified by the U.S. as a terrorist group
- when he applied for U.S. citizenship in 1994. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
announced his removal Friday.

His brother, Nabil Damra, said the Red Cross and the Center for the Defense of the Individual,
an Israeli advocacy group for Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories, told him that Fawaz
Damra was in custody and had been taken to Israel's Al Jalameh detention facility in Israel,
near Jenin, West Bank.

Israeli military and security officials had no comment, and a Red Cross official in Jerusalem
said he did not know of the case.

-snip-

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6331636,00.html