When Yonas Fikre stepped off a luxury
private jet at Portland airport last month, the only passenger on a
$200,000 flight from Sweden, he braced for the worst.
Would the FBI be
waiting? That would mean more interrogation, maybe arrest. But he told
himself that whatever happened it could hardly be as bad as the months
of torture he endured in a foreign jail before years of exile in
Scandinavia.
A US immigration officer boarded the
plane and asked for his passport. Fikre handed over the flimsy travel
document that was valid for a single flight to the US. The officer said
all was in order. He was free to go.
“I don’t think they knew who I was. I
think they thought I was just some rich guy who’d come on a private jet.
A rapper or someone,” said Fikre.
The 36-year-old Eritrean-born American
was finally back in Portland at the end of a five-year odyssey that
began with a simple business trip but landed him in an Arab prison where
he alleges he was tortured at the behest of US anti-terrorism officials
because he refused to become an informant at his mosque in Oregon.
Fikre is suing the FBI, two of its
agents and other American officials for allegedly putting him on the
US’s no-fly list – a roster of suspected terrorists barred from taking
commercial flights – to pressure him to collaborate. When that failed,
the lawsuit said, the FBI had him arrested, interrogated and tortured
for 106 days in the United Arab Emirates.
As shocking as the claims are, they are
not the first to emanate from worshippers at Fikre’s mosque in Portland,
where at least nine members have been barred from flying by the US
authorities.
“The no-fly list gives the FBI an
extrajudicial tool to coerce Muslims to become informants,” said Gadeir
Abbas, a lawyer who represents other clients on the list. “There’s
definitely a cluster of cases like this at the FBI’s Portland office.”
They include Jamal Tarhuni, a 58
year-old Portland businessman who travelled to Libya with a Christian
charity, Medical Teams International, in 2012. He was blocked from
flying back to the US and interrogated by an FBI agent who pressed him
to sign a document waving his constitutional rights.
“The no-fly list is being used to
intimidate and coerce people – not for protection, but instead for
aggression,” said Tarhuni after getting back to Portland a month later.
He was removed from the no-fly list in February after a federal lawsuit.
Detained, then put on the no-fly list
Another member of the mosque, Michael
Migliore, chose to emigrate to live with his mother in Italy because he
was placed on a no-fly list after refusing to answer FBI questions
without a lawyer or become an informant. He had to take a train to New
York and a ship to England. In the UK, he was detained under
anti-terrorism legislation. Migliore said his British lawyer told him it
was at the behest of US officials.
“We have a name for it: proxy
detention,” said Abbas, Migliore’s lawyer. “It’s something the FBI does
regularly. It’s not uncommon for American Muslims to travel outside the
US and find they can’t fly back and then they get approached by law
enforcement to answer questions at the behest of the Americans.”
Fikre’s problems began not long after he
travelled to Khartoum to set up an electronics import business. He
still had relatives in Sudan after his family fled there when he was a
child to escape conflict in Eritrea. Fikre’s family arrived to
California as refugees when he was 13 and he moved to Portland in 2006
where he worked for a mobile phone company.
Not long after he arrived in Khartoum in
June 2010, Fikre went to the US embassy to seek advice from its
commercial section. A couple of days later he was invited back to what
he was told would be a briefing for US citizens on the security
situation. Instead he found himself in a small room with two men.
“They pulled out their badges. They mentioned their names and said they were from the FBI Portland field office,” he said.
The agents were David Noordeloos and
Jason Dundas, both attached to the Joint Terrorism Task Force at the FBI
office in Portland. Fikre was immediately suspicious because of the
agents’ duplicity in luring him to the embassy.
“They said, we just want to ask you a
few questions. Right away I invoked my right to have a lawyer. Then they
became threatening,” he said.
Fikre said it swiftly became clear the agents wanted information about his mosque in Portland, Masjed As-Saber.
The mosque is the largest in Oregon and
drew the FBI’s attention not long after 9/11. In 2002, four years before
Fikre arrived in Portland, seven members of its congregation were
charged for attempting to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban. Six
received prison sentences. A seventh was killed in Afghanistan.
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