Om_Mohammed
28-08-2002, 08:02
Man blames 9/11 backlash for deportation
The north state resident denies any link to terrorism, but he is still being forced to leave.
By Herbert A. Sample -- Bee San Francisco Bureau
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Tuesday, August 27, 2002CORNING -- Within the next few days, a businessman from this small Tehama County town will be escorted onto an airplane for a long, tedious flight to Pakistan, his wrists in handcuffs.
The trip will come after weeks of insinuations from federal authorities that Nasir Ali Mubarak, a Corning resident for five years, either has links to terrorists or is one himself. They never formalized the allegations and have yet to prove them.
And now they won't have to.
Mubarak, who has been confined in jail since early June, agreed last week not to fight the INS on a single, run-of-the-mill immigration violation and to be deported to Pakistan. His wife, a nearly lifelong resident here, and two small children will stay behind, at least temporarily.
Mubarak's allies -- and he has many here and in nearby Red Bluff -- believe the U.S. government has bullied a friendly, hardworking man whose one major fault was a tangled romantic life. Mubarak, 34, says he loves his adopted country of 11 years and is crestfallen about how his life has turned upside down.
"It's completely unfair," he said in an interview after the deportation order was issued. Before immigrating in 1991, "I hear the United States (is) the best place for human rights. That was big bull----. That was big lie. Now, I know."
Mubarak's lawyer said the fact U.S. authorities aren't fighting the departure is telling.
"Given that the government is willing to deport him demonstrates that there was nothing to the allegations of terrorism," said Marc Van Der Hout.
Otherwise, he added, "They would have locked him up for a long time."
Federal officials refuse to discuss the case. So when Mubarak's plane departs, one sizeable question will linger: Is he a terrorist or an unwitting victim of the war on terrorism? Nasir Mubarak was born in Pakistan on Sept. 2, 1967. Three years later, his family moved to the United Arab Emirates on the southern end of the Persian Gulf. His father opened a dry-cleaning business.
According to interviews with him and his wife, lawyer and supporters, Mubarak long had dreamed of learning to fly. He attended a flight school in the UAE, and in November 1991 arrived in San Antonio, Texas, with a one-year student visa and plans to attend a flight school there. Mubarak's father had died and he was using money from the life insurance policy.
But he said he found the facility inadequate, and after a week, he and a Kuwaiti acquaintance from the UAE named Abdul Hakim Murad left for another flight school in Schenectady, N.Y. Mubarak earned various pilot licenses there. However, Murad, who Mubarak said apparently was unhappy with the location, had departed for another school in North Carolina.
In mid-1992, Mubarak and Murad joined up again and moved to Red Bluff for further flight training, only to discover the school they planned to attend had closed.
Mubarak found a job with Diamond Air, a small aircraft refurbishing company at the local airport owned by Skip Baron. The two became so close that when Baron died from cancer in 1995, he willed his business to Mubarak.
"Nasir is the next best thing to my own son," said Toni Kennard-Howard, who was engaged to Baron. "I couldn't begin to tell you enough of what a good, kind young man he is. When I needed him, when Skip got bad at the tail end ... I could call Nasir at 2 o'clock in the morning, 6 o'clock in the morning, and he was there."
Murad remained in Red Bluff only a few weeks before Mubarak drove him to San Francisco for a flight to the UAE. Mubarak has said that was the last time he saw Murad, according to court documents.
But their association would later raise questions.
In 1995, Murad was arrested in the Philippines after mistakenly mixing explosives residue with water, which erupted into flames. Interrogation by Philippine authorities -- it has been described widely as torture -- revealed a plot to place bombs in a dozen U.S. passenger jets. Murad named Mubarak as someone he once knew in the United States, according to Mubarak's lawyer.
Murad was extradited to the United States, and in 1996 was convicted of the bombing plot. One of his co-defendants, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, later was convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Murad and Yousef are serving sentences of life without parole.
Meanwhile, Mubarak, still in Red Bluff, dated a woman named Bertha Acevedo, who in 1993 bore his son, Adnan. A daughter, Hanna, arrived in 1999. Acevedo and Mubarak never married.
The same year Adnan was born, Mubarak married Brandy Matthew of Tehama County. The marriage was annulled almost immediately after Mubarak learned his bride had slept with another man, according to what he later told the FBI.
In 1997, Mubarak closed the ailing Diamond Air and moved 20 miles south to Corning. There, he and a friend started A&B Aircraft Painting on the fringe of the town's dusty airport.
The business struggled at first, but Mubarak found advice and aid in another friend, William Wax, a private pilot who loaned A&B money to buy a painting hanger.
"He doesn't know how to run a business properly, though he works very hard at it," said Wax.
A&B slowly improved as word of mouth about Mubarak's painting skills circulated among small aircraft owners. But his romantic life took more twists.
In September, 1997, Mubarak, then 30, and 18-year-old Automne Burton of Red Bluff married in Reno. They soon filed papers with the Immigration and Naturalization Service seeking permanent residency for Mubarak based on his marriage to a U.S. citizen.
However, the couple did not attend any of the three interviews scheduled with INS officials, and their request was denied in early 1999. The marriage was dissolved in November 1999.
Less than a week after the divorce was finalized, Mubarak married Stephanie Jolley, then 26, whom he had been courting in Corning for a few months. Jolley, who recently had divorced her first husband, said she was unconcerned about her new husband's previous romances.
"We didn't care so much what happened in the past. We just cared who the person is today," she said.
Finally, all seemed well for Mubarak. His newest request for legal residency was progressing, in part because Burton had signed a notarized statement saying her marriage to Mubarak was real and not aimed at thwarting immigration laws. Mubarak was supporting financially and spending time with his two children by Acevedo. And, according to nearly everyone who knows him, Mubarak worked incessantly.
"He's a workaholic," said Jack Alexander, a local building inspector and friend. "I've been up there at 9 o'clock in the morning and I'd wake him up sleeping on some cardboard on the floor. That's just the way he was."
Then Sept. 11 happened. The afternoon of the attacks, two FBI agents showed up at Mubarak's business to interview him. Their report, contained in court documents, outlined Mubarak's personal history but included no direct evidence linking him to a terrorist plot. There was no explanation of why the FBI sought him out that day, although the report indicates they asked about Murad.
"At the conclusion of the interview, Mubarak reiterated his condemnation of the terrorist attacks and offered to provide any assistance as needed," the report said.
Three months later, Mubarak voluntarily took a lie detector test during which he was asked whether he had ever participated in a terrorist plot against the U.S. or was withholding information about such schemes. He replied no to each query, but based on the lie detector results, the examiner reported his answers as "inconclusive," according to court documents.
Stephanie Mubarak said her husband was horrified by the Sept. 11 attacks. He and a friend donated blood, she recalled. After President Bush publicly appealed for help from persons with language skills, Mubarak, who speaks five languages, applied with the FBI -- an action the agency acknowledges. He sent the White House a letter earlier this year offering assistance.
When FBI agents interviewed Mubarak on May 28 and June 2, he acknowledged having known Murad 10 years before but denied having had contact with him since, according to their reports. The reports, contained in court documents, disclosed no connection to terrorism, but after the second meeting, the INS arrested him.
The INS has refused to discuss Mubarak's case, citing a federal privacy law. The FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Sacramento also would not comment.
Officially, the INS detained Mubarak for overstaying his student visa. In doing so, the agency revoked its 1999 decision allowing him to remain free on his own recognizance while proceedings continued regarding his expired visa, his failed marriage to Burton and new marriage to Jolley.
Four days after his arrest, ex-wife Burton, who had been granted immunity from prosecution, signed a sworn statement that she never had lived with Mubarak and that her marriage to him was a sham. Further, she claimed, Mubarak had offered her $15,000 to marry him, though she never received it.
The INS obtained sworn statements from Burton's mother and one of her friends corroborating the allegations.
But from the first of several bail hearings in immigration court that began in late June, it was clear the government was after more than routine immigration violations. Searches of the Mubaraks' home turned up aerial pictures of the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center, snapshots of Murad, and invoices for chemical purchases.
Van Der Hout, Mubarak's lawyer, says there are perfectly reasonable explanations for each item: The New York City pictures, he said, were taken when Mubarak was in flight school 11 years ago. An instructor who taught Mubarak at the Schenectady flight school said in an affidavit that he often flew with students around New York City, noting he owns similar pictures of the city's skyline.
Van Der Hout said the pictures with Murad were taken before he left the country in 1992 and that the chemicals were purchased for Mubarak's business, which involves chemically stripping planes to bare metal before repainting.
Stephanie Mubarak insists her husband's association with Murad 10 years ago is meaningless now.
"We've all known somebody in our lives that has committed criminal acts. Does that make you guilty?" she said.
And Nasir Mubarak disputes Burton's depiction of their marriage, saying she moved into his home soon after their wedding but left promptly after they experienced problems.
"I never offered her money to marry me," he said in a signed declaration filed with the court. "I wanted to marry her because I wanted a woman in my life and we really liked each other." In the weeks following Mubarak's arrest, friends and customers from Red Bluff, Corning, Oakland and elsewhere wrote glowing letters on his behalf. Several formed an informal support group, which chartered a bus to drive to San Francisco in late June to demonstrate community backing at his first immigration hearing.
Charles Krause, a retired teacher and pilot, who met Mubarak at the Red Bluff airport years ago, scoffed when asked if Mubarak could be a terrorist.
"Absolutely not," he said. "He was a hardworking man. He didn't have time to be connected with terrorists."
Jerry Turney, an Oakland pilot who heads up the support group, recalled how Mubarak last year completed a six-week repainting of Turney's small aircraft in half the expected time. The work's quality helped Turney win a major award at a recent competition.
If Mubarak's hard work was "serving some other purpose, you're not going to get the kind of treatment I got," Turney said.
Dr. Lesa Lane, a Corning chiropractor who has treated the Mubaraks, said simply, "I think he's being railroaded."
But at least one friend is now less certain about Mubarak. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Donald Kinser of Red Bluff had written to the court in his support. After a visit from FBI agent Michael Di Roma, however, Kinser, who once held top-secret clearances, said he is unsure.
"I can't talk about (what Di Roma said) except it was a disappointment to me," Kinser said.
For a dejected Mubarak, the debate has ended. Last week, he told immigration judge Alberto Gonzalez he no longer wanted to fight deportation. Van Der Hout previously had explained to him that even if he won release on bail, federal law allows the INS to keep him in jail, perhaps for years, while appealing the ruling.
While Mubarak has admitted overstaying his visa, Van Der Hout said the efforts to deport him for that violation now, while insinuating ties to terrorism, represent an overreaction to the Sept. 11 attacks.
"This is a story of how unsupported allegations -- especially post-9/11, against Muslims (and) people from Arab countries -- have ruined people's lives," Van Der Hout said. "The FBI and INS can make these vague allegations, keep people in custody for months on end, until they finally wear people down."
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo countered that the government has every right to prosecute even the smallest immigration violations, noting that the attacks clearly demonstrated problems with the U.S. immigration system.
Mubarak said he has no family left in Pakistan and will try to return to the UAE, where a brother resides. Stephanie said she eventually will join him. His two children will remain with Acevedo in Los Molinos, near Corning; Mubarak says he worries about how she will support them.
"I love this country," a tearful Mubarak told the judge last week. "I want to stay here. This is my home."
Mubarak is angry that authorities have yet to prove he has anything to do with terrorism.
"This is not a game. This is my life, my wife's life," Mubarak said. "I really want to go back home after (being) insulted. ... I want to go back where I can breathe free."
About the Writer
---------------------------
The Bee's Herbert A. Sample can be reached at(510) 625-9983 or hsample@sacbee.com.
The north state resident denies any link to terrorism, but he is still being forced to leave.
By Herbert A. Sample -- Bee San Francisco Bureau
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Tuesday, August 27, 2002CORNING -- Within the next few days, a businessman from this small Tehama County town will be escorted onto an airplane for a long, tedious flight to Pakistan, his wrists in handcuffs.
The trip will come after weeks of insinuations from federal authorities that Nasir Ali Mubarak, a Corning resident for five years, either has links to terrorists or is one himself. They never formalized the allegations and have yet to prove them.
And now they won't have to.
Mubarak, who has been confined in jail since early June, agreed last week not to fight the INS on a single, run-of-the-mill immigration violation and to be deported to Pakistan. His wife, a nearly lifelong resident here, and two small children will stay behind, at least temporarily.
Mubarak's allies -- and he has many here and in nearby Red Bluff -- believe the U.S. government has bullied a friendly, hardworking man whose one major fault was a tangled romantic life. Mubarak, 34, says he loves his adopted country of 11 years and is crestfallen about how his life has turned upside down.
"It's completely unfair," he said in an interview after the deportation order was issued. Before immigrating in 1991, "I hear the United States (is) the best place for human rights. That was big bull----. That was big lie. Now, I know."
Mubarak's lawyer said the fact U.S. authorities aren't fighting the departure is telling.
"Given that the government is willing to deport him demonstrates that there was nothing to the allegations of terrorism," said Marc Van Der Hout.
Otherwise, he added, "They would have locked him up for a long time."
Federal officials refuse to discuss the case. So when Mubarak's plane departs, one sizeable question will linger: Is he a terrorist or an unwitting victim of the war on terrorism? Nasir Mubarak was born in Pakistan on Sept. 2, 1967. Three years later, his family moved to the United Arab Emirates on the southern end of the Persian Gulf. His father opened a dry-cleaning business.
According to interviews with him and his wife, lawyer and supporters, Mubarak long had dreamed of learning to fly. He attended a flight school in the UAE, and in November 1991 arrived in San Antonio, Texas, with a one-year student visa and plans to attend a flight school there. Mubarak's father had died and he was using money from the life insurance policy.
But he said he found the facility inadequate, and after a week, he and a Kuwaiti acquaintance from the UAE named Abdul Hakim Murad left for another flight school in Schenectady, N.Y. Mubarak earned various pilot licenses there. However, Murad, who Mubarak said apparently was unhappy with the location, had departed for another school in North Carolina.
In mid-1992, Mubarak and Murad joined up again and moved to Red Bluff for further flight training, only to discover the school they planned to attend had closed.
Mubarak found a job with Diamond Air, a small aircraft refurbishing company at the local airport owned by Skip Baron. The two became so close that when Baron died from cancer in 1995, he willed his business to Mubarak.
"Nasir is the next best thing to my own son," said Toni Kennard-Howard, who was engaged to Baron. "I couldn't begin to tell you enough of what a good, kind young man he is. When I needed him, when Skip got bad at the tail end ... I could call Nasir at 2 o'clock in the morning, 6 o'clock in the morning, and he was there."
Murad remained in Red Bluff only a few weeks before Mubarak drove him to San Francisco for a flight to the UAE. Mubarak has said that was the last time he saw Murad, according to court documents.
But their association would later raise questions.
In 1995, Murad was arrested in the Philippines after mistakenly mixing explosives residue with water, which erupted into flames. Interrogation by Philippine authorities -- it has been described widely as torture -- revealed a plot to place bombs in a dozen U.S. passenger jets. Murad named Mubarak as someone he once knew in the United States, according to Mubarak's lawyer.
Murad was extradited to the United States, and in 1996 was convicted of the bombing plot. One of his co-defendants, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, later was convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Murad and Yousef are serving sentences of life without parole.
Meanwhile, Mubarak, still in Red Bluff, dated a woman named Bertha Acevedo, who in 1993 bore his son, Adnan. A daughter, Hanna, arrived in 1999. Acevedo and Mubarak never married.
The same year Adnan was born, Mubarak married Brandy Matthew of Tehama County. The marriage was annulled almost immediately after Mubarak learned his bride had slept with another man, according to what he later told the FBI.
In 1997, Mubarak closed the ailing Diamond Air and moved 20 miles south to Corning. There, he and a friend started A&B Aircraft Painting on the fringe of the town's dusty airport.
The business struggled at first, but Mubarak found advice and aid in another friend, William Wax, a private pilot who loaned A&B money to buy a painting hanger.
"He doesn't know how to run a business properly, though he works very hard at it," said Wax.
A&B slowly improved as word of mouth about Mubarak's painting skills circulated among small aircraft owners. But his romantic life took more twists.
In September, 1997, Mubarak, then 30, and 18-year-old Automne Burton of Red Bluff married in Reno. They soon filed papers with the Immigration and Naturalization Service seeking permanent residency for Mubarak based on his marriage to a U.S. citizen.
However, the couple did not attend any of the three interviews scheduled with INS officials, and their request was denied in early 1999. The marriage was dissolved in November 1999.
Less than a week after the divorce was finalized, Mubarak married Stephanie Jolley, then 26, whom he had been courting in Corning for a few months. Jolley, who recently had divorced her first husband, said she was unconcerned about her new husband's previous romances.
"We didn't care so much what happened in the past. We just cared who the person is today," she said.
Finally, all seemed well for Mubarak. His newest request for legal residency was progressing, in part because Burton had signed a notarized statement saying her marriage to Mubarak was real and not aimed at thwarting immigration laws. Mubarak was supporting financially and spending time with his two children by Acevedo. And, according to nearly everyone who knows him, Mubarak worked incessantly.
"He's a workaholic," said Jack Alexander, a local building inspector and friend. "I've been up there at 9 o'clock in the morning and I'd wake him up sleeping on some cardboard on the floor. That's just the way he was."
Then Sept. 11 happened. The afternoon of the attacks, two FBI agents showed up at Mubarak's business to interview him. Their report, contained in court documents, outlined Mubarak's personal history but included no direct evidence linking him to a terrorist plot. There was no explanation of why the FBI sought him out that day, although the report indicates they asked about Murad.
"At the conclusion of the interview, Mubarak reiterated his condemnation of the terrorist attacks and offered to provide any assistance as needed," the report said.
Three months later, Mubarak voluntarily took a lie detector test during which he was asked whether he had ever participated in a terrorist plot against the U.S. or was withholding information about such schemes. He replied no to each query, but based on the lie detector results, the examiner reported his answers as "inconclusive," according to court documents.
Stephanie Mubarak said her husband was horrified by the Sept. 11 attacks. He and a friend donated blood, she recalled. After President Bush publicly appealed for help from persons with language skills, Mubarak, who speaks five languages, applied with the FBI -- an action the agency acknowledges. He sent the White House a letter earlier this year offering assistance.
When FBI agents interviewed Mubarak on May 28 and June 2, he acknowledged having known Murad 10 years before but denied having had contact with him since, according to their reports. The reports, contained in court documents, disclosed no connection to terrorism, but after the second meeting, the INS arrested him.
The INS has refused to discuss Mubarak's case, citing a federal privacy law. The FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Sacramento also would not comment.
Officially, the INS detained Mubarak for overstaying his student visa. In doing so, the agency revoked its 1999 decision allowing him to remain free on his own recognizance while proceedings continued regarding his expired visa, his failed marriage to Burton and new marriage to Jolley.
Four days after his arrest, ex-wife Burton, who had been granted immunity from prosecution, signed a sworn statement that she never had lived with Mubarak and that her marriage to him was a sham. Further, she claimed, Mubarak had offered her $15,000 to marry him, though she never received it.
The INS obtained sworn statements from Burton's mother and one of her friends corroborating the allegations.
But from the first of several bail hearings in immigration court that began in late June, it was clear the government was after more than routine immigration violations. Searches of the Mubaraks' home turned up aerial pictures of the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center, snapshots of Murad, and invoices for chemical purchases.
Van Der Hout, Mubarak's lawyer, says there are perfectly reasonable explanations for each item: The New York City pictures, he said, were taken when Mubarak was in flight school 11 years ago. An instructor who taught Mubarak at the Schenectady flight school said in an affidavit that he often flew with students around New York City, noting he owns similar pictures of the city's skyline.
Van Der Hout said the pictures with Murad were taken before he left the country in 1992 and that the chemicals were purchased for Mubarak's business, which involves chemically stripping planes to bare metal before repainting.
Stephanie Mubarak insists her husband's association with Murad 10 years ago is meaningless now.
"We've all known somebody in our lives that has committed criminal acts. Does that make you guilty?" she said.
And Nasir Mubarak disputes Burton's depiction of their marriage, saying she moved into his home soon after their wedding but left promptly after they experienced problems.
"I never offered her money to marry me," he said in a signed declaration filed with the court. "I wanted to marry her because I wanted a woman in my life and we really liked each other." In the weeks following Mubarak's arrest, friends and customers from Red Bluff, Corning, Oakland and elsewhere wrote glowing letters on his behalf. Several formed an informal support group, which chartered a bus to drive to San Francisco in late June to demonstrate community backing at his first immigration hearing.
Charles Krause, a retired teacher and pilot, who met Mubarak at the Red Bluff airport years ago, scoffed when asked if Mubarak could be a terrorist.
"Absolutely not," he said. "He was a hardworking man. He didn't have time to be connected with terrorists."
Jerry Turney, an Oakland pilot who heads up the support group, recalled how Mubarak last year completed a six-week repainting of Turney's small aircraft in half the expected time. The work's quality helped Turney win a major award at a recent competition.
If Mubarak's hard work was "serving some other purpose, you're not going to get the kind of treatment I got," Turney said.
Dr. Lesa Lane, a Corning chiropractor who has treated the Mubaraks, said simply, "I think he's being railroaded."
But at least one friend is now less certain about Mubarak. Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Donald Kinser of Red Bluff had written to the court in his support. After a visit from FBI agent Michael Di Roma, however, Kinser, who once held top-secret clearances, said he is unsure.
"I can't talk about (what Di Roma said) except it was a disappointment to me," Kinser said.
For a dejected Mubarak, the debate has ended. Last week, he told immigration judge Alberto Gonzalez he no longer wanted to fight deportation. Van Der Hout previously had explained to him that even if he won release on bail, federal law allows the INS to keep him in jail, perhaps for years, while appealing the ruling.
While Mubarak has admitted overstaying his visa, Van Der Hout said the efforts to deport him for that violation now, while insinuating ties to terrorism, represent an overreaction to the Sept. 11 attacks.
"This is a story of how unsupported allegations -- especially post-9/11, against Muslims (and) people from Arab countries -- have ruined people's lives," Van Der Hout said. "The FBI and INS can make these vague allegations, keep people in custody for months on end, until they finally wear people down."
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo countered that the government has every right to prosecute even the smallest immigration violations, noting that the attacks clearly demonstrated problems with the U.S. immigration system.
Mubarak said he has no family left in Pakistan and will try to return to the UAE, where a brother resides. Stephanie said she eventually will join him. His two children will remain with Acevedo in Los Molinos, near Corning; Mubarak says he worries about how she will support them.
"I love this country," a tearful Mubarak told the judge last week. "I want to stay here. This is my home."
Mubarak is angry that authorities have yet to prove he has anything to do with terrorism.
"This is not a game. This is my life, my wife's life," Mubarak said. "I really want to go back home after (being) insulted. ... I want to go back where I can breathe free."
About the Writer
---------------------------
The Bee's Herbert A. Sample can be reached at(510) 625-9983 or hsample@sacbee.com.