Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2001 Student Work

Egyptian man spends 3 ½ years in prison, in solitary confinement, without charges or trial – in America

By Adeel Hassan

On a warm spring day in lower Manhattan, Nasser Ahmed, 40, is all smiles as he bounds around the indoor soccer field at Chelsea Piers in his dark blue and white-striped uniform. He checks in and out of the game frequently, playing about half of it. His arthritic joints need the rest. Ahmed’s physical pain stems from three and a half years in prison, in solitary confinement, where he was unable to exercise and frequently went on hunger strikes.

You think, This must be a thoroughly evil fellow.

Then you find out he was never formally charged with a crime, much less convicted of one. Neither he nor his lawyers know what he did time for.

You think, Well he’s obviously from some dictatorship with a judicial system run by thugs. Thankfully, he’s made it here on political asylum.

Then you find out he was arrested and imprisoned right here in New York City.

Living a life right of Kafka’s The Trial, the Egyptian-born Ahmed was locked away on vague charges and evidence kept secret from him and his attorney. The phenomenon is known as secret evidence and the nation hasn’t seen anything like it since the McCarthyism smears and blacklists in the 1950’s. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (I.N.S.) has wanted to use secret evidence in deportation proceedings for years. Congress, with the support of President Clinton, provided the statute in 1996 to allow the concealing of evidence from an alien who was suspected of association with terrorism.

The creation of the statute, officially called the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), soon followed the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Secret evidence has now been used in about two dozen cases around the country in which the I.N.S. asserted national security concerns as the basis for depriving immigrants of the right to examine and confront witnesses and evidence. All but one of the cases are against Arab or Muslim immigrants. Ahmed fits the bill perfectly.

Nasser Ahmed was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt and attended Alexandria University, where he studied engineering. His parents and the families of his two brothers and two sisters still live there. He came to the United States in 1986 with his wife Salwa Al-Byadi, a physician, now 39. The couple had come on a tourist visa and found an apartment just off Stillwell Avenue in Brooklyn. Ahmed dreamed of finding a job as an electrical engineer. In the meantime, he worked as a cab driver and at a gas station near his home. After six months, the tourist visas expired and their application for a change of visa status was denied. But the couple did not want to go back to Egypt. They continued living in Brooklyn.

“We had made lots of friends, in the Egyptian community, the Muslim community and in our apartment building,” Ahmed said. “I knew this was where I wanted to be, where I wanted to raise my family. I just needed to buy a little extra time to get an engineering job.”

But it took much longer than he ever though it would. He began working for a Manhattan engineering firm in 1989 and the company helped him get a much-coveted work visa. At the same time, his many friends and active participation in the community helped to get him elected to the board of directors of his local mosque, the Abu Bakr Mosque, on Foster Avenue. He was its treasurer.

As part of his new position, he began organizing classes, lectures and prayers at Abu Bakr, where the members are predominantly Egyptians and first-generation immigrants. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, an outspoken critic of the Egyptian government and its human rights abuses, which have been documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and many other groups, was an occasional visitor.

“I met him in early 1991 and we quickly became friends,” Ahmed said of the Sheikh. “I respected him. He was a scholar, he was an Egyptian, and he was blind. I learned a lot about the Egyptian government from him.”

One of the things Ahmed would learn is that the elderly Sheikh served as the spiritual leader of the Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the opposition group to the Egyptian government. At the time Ahmed met him, the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was in a bitter conflict with Islamic activists.

“I had never bothered with politics when I lived in Egypt,” Ahmed said. “I went to the mosque and my focus was on my school work. When I first met the Sheikh, I did not know he was an important figure in Egypt. I just thought he was an old, blind man in Brooklyn. I thought I should help him walk around the mosque and the neighborhood.”

But it was the Sheikh who stepped in and tried to help Ahmed during a family dispute. He and his wife were having a disagreement over whether she could travel to Egypt to help her dying mother. At the time, they were still staying in the U.S. on temporary visas, so Ahmed wanted her to stay. As is the custom in Islam, they asked the help of the most knowledgeable Islamic scholar in the community. For the couple, it was the Sheikh.

“He decided that my wife should go and help her mother,” Ahmed recalled. “It was more important to go and take care of her at that point than to worry about visa status because she may never see her again.”

Ahmed’s wife never made the trip, but Ahmed and the Sheikh had become closer as a result of the counseling session. Soon after, Ahmed asked the Sheikh to give a lecture at the Abu Bakr Mosque. It is common for scholars to lecture at mosques, especially during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“It was to be a regular lecture,” Ahmed said. “He was going to expose the human rights abuses of the Egyptian government.”

By now, the mosque that Ahmed literally built was under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) because of the Sheikh’s opposition to a key American ally, Mubarak. Ahmed was responsible for expanding the mosque from a 75-person capacity to over 800 from 1989 to 1991, using his engineering expertise and even buying the supplies and supervising the construction.

It was here that shortly after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Sheikh was arrested and charged with conspiring to murder Hosni Mubarak and bomb major New York City landmarks, as well as F.B.I. Headquarters.

“It was right inside the mosque, I was there at the time,” Ahmed said. He tried to help the blind cleric by talking to him and trying to explain what was going on. As the Sheikh was taken out the door, Ahmed was right with him, and found himself on the front pages of all the newspapers the next day.

When the Sheikh was able to make a phone call, the first one he made was to Ahmed. “He trusted me, he wanted me to find him a lawyer,” Ahmed said. The F.B.I. noticed their closeness as well and soon he was the court-appointed translator and paralegal for the Sheikh’s defense team.

“I never thought twice about doing it,” Ahmed said. “I knew him very well. He needed me. Of course, I was going to do it.”

During the Sheikh’s trial, F.B.I. and I.N.S. agents tried to recruit Ahmed to cooperate with them as a paid employee of the United States government in their case. According to Abdeen Jabara, former president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, who served as one of the Sheikh’s lawyers, one of the I.N.S. agents told Ahmed that he knew “what will happen if you are deported back to Egypt.” Ahmed surely would have been imprisoned and likely tortured due to his friendship with the Sheikh.

When Ahmed refused, the agents first threatened him and his family and then the I.N.S. arrested him, oddly enough, on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing - April 19, 1995. Ahmed was charged with overstaying his work visa. He spent the next three days at the immigration jail, at 201 Varick St. He was released on $15,000 bond and returned to the Sheikh’s defense team, while his own lawyers proceeded with a political asylum application.

One year later, the I.N.S. arrested Ahmed. On April 23, 1996, while entering the I.N.S. office in Manhattan for a hearing on his political asylum, he was picked up and placed in solitary confinement in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

The World Trade Center trial was over by now, with the Sheikh convicted. When Ahmed’s lawyers tried to get him out of jail, they were informed, for the first time, that there was secret evidence. Meanwhile, the government was working feverishly to have him deported.

Ahmed had about half a dozen lawyers defending him pro-bono. Among them was Jabara, as well as Nancy Chang of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City and David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.

“The most basic principle of due process is that when the government seeks to take action against an individual, it must put its evidence on the table,” said Jabara. “What you have is the government saying that Ahmed is a devout Muslim who was friendly with the Sheikh and must therefore be a terrorist.”

Ahmed tried to get bail. That failed. The I.N.S. blocked him and said that national security would be threatened if they revealed the evidence against him. Immigration Judge Donn Livingston ruled in 1997 that Ahmed qualified for asylum. Later, he reversed himself, saying that there was secret evidence that he was associated with a known terrorist organization.

In December 1998, following two and a half years of incarceration, Ahmed was finally charged with making false statements a decade ago in an application for temporary residence status, not “terrorism.”

By now, Ahmed was being held at the Federal Penitentiary in Otisville, N.Y. He was taken there in an escorted helicopter. The move came in response to repeated protests outside the Metropolitan Correctional Center by the Committee for Justice for Nasser Ahmed. Otisville is approximately two hours away from Manhattan.

“They try to break you,” Ahmed said. “They moved me so it would be harder for my friends and family to see me. I’ve heard people in the cells near me try and kill themselves because they can’t take it anymore. But I knew they had nothing on me. For two years, they said I was a terrorist. Now they find possible document fraud. They’re liars, they’re liars, they’re liars.”

After the move upstate, Ahmed started going on hunger strikes, going 15 to 30 days only drinking water before he had to be force-fed by guards.

“They treated me as if I was the most dangerous man alive,” Ahmed said. “They segregated me 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was deprived of my right to contact lawyers, practice my religion, and have proper food and medication. My cholesterol was very high, my arthritis was really bad. And when you’re a high security risk, you have to be strip-searched and shackled every time you leave your cell. Even the murderers, the killers, and the rapists got to use the library. I was treated worse than all of them.”

The strip searches were particularly demeaning, Ahmed said, and led him to immediately stop leaving the cell for his permitted one hour of exercise. He was also allowed a one-hour visit once a week and a phone call once a month.

Ahmed said that undoubtedly his mental struggles were the most difficult part of solitary confinement “Being left in an unknown situation was the most paralyzing,” he said. “Regular prisoners know what they’re doing time for, they know when they’re going to come out. They know how they’re going to fight their case, their lawyers know what they’re going to do. I had none of that. I was living in constant fear of the unknown.”

When his three children asked Ahmed when he was coming out, he couldn’t tell them. He went so far as to ask his wife if she wanted a divorce so that they would have a father figure and some income. (Ahmed’s wife, who refused the divorce, was preparing to take the licensing exams for doctors). His lawyers couldn’t do much and became frustrated. On May 7, 1999, Judge Carol Bagley Amon of Federal District Court in Brooklyn refused to drop Ahmed’s indictment and cleared the way for his trial.

Ahmed was mentally preparing for a very long stay in prison, when on July 30, 1999, Judge Livingston reversed his earlier ruling against Ahmed, saying that he should be released from prison because he was not a threat to national security and should be granted political asylum in the United States.

“Virtually all of the secret information is hearsay. Most of the information is double or triple hearsay,” said Judge Livingston in his ruling. “The government’s failure to respond to the credibility questions leaves the court utterly unable to assess the reliability of the government’s hearsay evidence. The F.B.I. has refused to provide the court with evidence from which the court could make an independent evaluation of the credibility of its sources. In light of that refusal, this court must reject the secret information as being of unproven reliability.”

The government immediately appealed and argued that Ahmed was like a martyr in the Arab community, and that his influence and stature would grow following his release. The immigration officials secured a temporary stay and blocked his court-ordered release from prison. They asked Attorney General Janet Reno to extend Ahmed’s detention until the appeals process had been completed, yet again citing him as a threat to national security. On Nov. 29, 1999, Reno rejected that proposal and released him.

“Hopefully, we have put a nail in the coffin of the use of secret evidence,” Ahmed told reporters just minutes after he became a free man. “This practice is not even used in third world countries. This isn’t Egypt. The United States has a history of protecting constitutional rights, not violating them.”

Today, Ahmed tries to make up for the lost time with his children - he has four kids now. Not surprisingly, he believes his imprisonment was based on nonsense. “They put me in prison because I was associated with the Sheikh,” he said. “Well, of course I was, I was his court-appointed translator and paralegal.”

Ahmed said he had no regrets about refusing to help the government convict the Sheikh, which ultimately led to his imprisonment. The Sheikh was and still is a friend to him. Ahmed believes in the Sheikh’s innocence and adamantly states that he would never resort to violence.

While he now has political asylum, Ahmed is applying for a Green Card, but refuses to make any predictions, saying only that one can never predict what the government will do. His job at a Manhattan engineering firm, which has worked on Boston’s Central Artery Tunnel Project, Grand Central Station, and now the JFK Airport Rail Link, is stable. His four children are United States citizens. They have a home near the beaches of Coney Island.

It’s been exactly five years since Ahmed was arrested and taken away on secret evidence. And as Ahmed’s soccer game ends in an 11-5 loss, his team’s first loss in the spring league, he shakes hands with the opposing players and greets his family on the sidelines. But don’t tell Ahmed that it’s a loss. He knows that it’s only a game. His only loss was the three and a half years that secret evidence stole from him.

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