Family protest US treatment of Somali terror suspect

COLUMBUS, United States (AFP) - Relatives of Somali terror suspect Nuradin Abdi have had a hard time reconciling the man they know with the alleged bomb-plot conspirator and dedicated jihadist that US authorities say he is.

But neither did they recognize the broken-down, at times incoherent individual that appeared in court last month after six months in solitary confinement.

"He's the shell of the man we love and know," said his brother, Abdi Karani, 27.

Abdi's relatives suspect that Abdi, 32, described as an outgoing father-of-two, may have suffered a mental breakdown during his long months in custody. Some in this city's thriving Somali community of 30,000 question whether he was abused in prison.

"I am extremely concerned that his behaviors might indicate mental and possibly physical abuse during his detention, and that his mental injuries may be permanent," said Asma Mobin-Uddin, a physician and official with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

"In America," she goes on in an editorial printed in the Columbus Dispatch newspaper June 24, "we considered the use of torture unacceptable in civilized society.

"Has the war on terror changed our nation's values?"

Abdi was arrested in November 2003 on immigration violations, then charged in June with plotting to blow up a shopping mall in the US heartland with a convicted al-Qaeda conspirator.

His appearance at a June 16 hearing on the charges dismayed his family and friends.

Abdi banged his head on the table, laughed inappropriately, spoke to himself and stared off into space. He had to be eased into a chair after he hesitated to sit.

Abdi's family say they were allowed to see him just once in the six months that he was bounced around Ohio jails under the alias John Doe.

On that occasion, they say, he was disoriented and unresponsive. He slouched in a chair, hands handcuffed behind his back, chin to his chest.

"I called to him: Nuradin. Nuradin," Abdi's wife Safia Muse told the Columbus Dispatch newspaper. "But he didn't respond. He seemed confused and disoriented."

Federal authorities did not respond to phone calls seeking comment on the matter.

Abdi's attorney, Mahir Sherif, who recently took the case, said he believes his client is mentally ill. "He talks a whole lot of mumbo jumbo, and goes in and out of English, Arabic and Somali," Sherif said.

The court, at Sherif's request, has ordered Abdi to undergo psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he is competent to stand trial. The results are expected in September.

Abdi faces a maximum of 80 years in jail and a one million-dollar fine if convicted on all four counts of providing support to al-Qaeda and two counts of lying in US immigration documents.

A mental competency ruling would preclude Abdi from standing trial, but the government would likely continue deportation proceedings, according to John Quigley, a professor of law at Ohio State University.

Whatever the outcome, Abdi's case has stirred up resentment in the Somali and Muslim community here.

"The federal government is using nothing less than Gestapo techniques to round up Muslim men on technical immigration violations," complained Mohamud Musa Ahmid, who moved to Columbus in 1992 after fleeing the civil war in Somalia.

"Agents are arresting people in secret, holding them without charges, denying them access to lawyers, presuming they are guilty until proven innocent and trying them in secret -- all in the name of fighting terrorism," he said.

Mahmoud El-Yousseph, an outspoken Palestinian-American advocate, said that Abdi has "already been tried in the court of public opinion thanks to the federal government.

"People are forgetting that Muslims are as loyal as any other Americans," he said, adding the Muslims are too often victims of guilt by association.

Jad Humeidan, director of the Ohio chapter of CAIR, stressed that the community's support was not unconditional. "We will not tolerate any form of terrorism or any act that jeopardizes the security of our nation or the world," he said.

But Humeidan said he feared that Abdi might simply be another unwitting victim of over-zealous officials prosecuting the war on terror, much like the Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield and the Muslim Army chaplain Joseph Yee.

Yee spent three months in solitary confinement on suspicion of spying for alleged al-Qaeda militants detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was a chaplain. The case against him eventually unraveled.

Mayfield spent two weeks in jail in Oregon in May this year after the FBI (news - web sites) mistakenly linked him to the Madrid train bombings. The Federal Bureau of Investigation later apologized.