Worries Mount As Son Remains in Ethiopia

By REBECCA SANTANA, Associated Press Writer
Saturday, April 28, 2007

The family of a man being held in Ethiopia for alleged ties to Islamic militants is growing increasingly frustrated that he is still being detained despite reports that he would be released.

News reports, a congressman's office and U.S. officials said this month that U.S.-born Amir Mohamed Meshal, 24, would soon be freed. But no one seems to know exactly why he was not.

"It was an emotional roller-coaster for us," said his father, Mohamed Meshal, speaking from their home in Tinton Falls on the Jersey shore. "We started cooking, and marinating the meat for his homecoming and the next minute, everything collapses."

Amir Meshal was in Somalia at a time when much of the country was controlled by hard-line Islamists. Hundreds of people, including Islamist fighters, fled Somalia for Kenya in late December and January after Ethiopian troops invaded the country in support of a weak but internationally backed government.

After his arrest in Kenya, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi asked Kenyan authorities to deport Meshal to the United States, then filed a formal protest when it learned he had been returned to Somalia and then sent to Ethiopia.

U.S. authorities in Washington have said that after interviewing Meshal in Kenya they determined he was not a threat and hadn't violated U.S. law.

Meshal is one of dozens held by Ethiopia in what human rights activists and lawyers say is an illegal detention program that violates international laws on deportations and the treatment of prisoners. Ethiopia denies the charges, saying that the detentions are part of the fight against terrorism and that it has the right to defend itself.

"I'm worried about his welfare, his safety, his security," Meshal's father said. "Why doesn't the U.S. government demand his immediate release and bring him home?"

The Meshals vehemently deny their son was a fighter, said he had been a tour guide in Dubai and didn't realize he was in Somalia until U.S. officials showed up at their door in early February.

Relatives have not been able to talk with him, although they have received written messages from him through U.S. Embassy officials in Ethiopia who visited him. He told them that he was being treated well.

Earlier this month, U.S. officials said Meshal would soon be freed.

U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he has been frustrated by the often-contradictory information he has received about Meshal from U.S. government agencies. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Holt asked her to intervene.

Said State Department spokesman Tom Casey: "We certainly had hoped that this case would be resolved earlier. We continue to discuss this issue with the Ethiopian government."

Meanwhile, Meshal's family and a lawyer assisting them have raised questions about whether the U.S. government is doing all it can to free him.

Attorney Jonathan Hafetz said that the idea that the Ethiopian government is acting to keep Meshal without tacit U.S. approval is "ludicrous" and that the U.S. government's failure to bring him home "has caused tremendous hardship to his family and flouted the duty it owes to all American citizens."

"The United States should stop equivocating and end this ordeal now," he said.


Associated Press writer Anne Gearan in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.