Posted on 08/13/2006 3:22:59 PM PDT by cornfedcowboy
WASHINGTON -- Immigration officials have now picked up all but two of the 11 Egyptian exchange students who came to the U.S. for a summer course in Montana but never showed up for classes.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents tracked three of the students to Des Moines. They were arrested at about 8 p.m. Friday, and are being held in the Polk County Jail.
They will be here until a federal immigration judge decides if they will face charges or be deported. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents won't say what led them to find these students in Des Moines or where they were staying. The students are Ahmed Laket, 19, Mohamed Moghazy, 20, and 18-year-old Moustafa Gafary. Agents are not releasing their pictures.
Others were picked up earlier in New Jersey, Maryland, Chicago and Minnesota. They were part of a group of 17 who arrived in New York July 29 en route to a month-long program at Montana State University in Bozeman. Six reported on time, but the 11 others were no-shows.
Immigration officials said the students are not considered a terrorism risk, but all the no-shows now face deportation.
Montana State contacted Homeland Security officials after repeatedly trying to contact the missing students, under procedures put into place after Sept. 11, 2001, to track foreign students.
Or, alternatively, somebody at a mosque finally watched some television.
Why didn't they ask for help getting "unlost?"
ALL eleven of them, split up, and not ONE of them did this?
No, I do not believe that for one minute.
Gitmo Hilton has openings ... send them there.
Maybe some were taken to a nearby mosque. Others were probably dropped at relatives, or, if the kid had a relative, the cabdriver may have taken them all the way to that location. Others were helped to get a different flight somewhere.
No wonder the FBI doesn't see anything sinister in this.
Fur Shur there are ticket agents at airports who do remember dealing with a young Arabic speaking individual who needed the help of an interpreter who didn't understand the student all that well.
No doubt both the helpers and the ticket agents had difficulty buying into the idea that the kid really did want to go to Montana~!!!
They could have asked for helped getting unlost.
It is that simple.
This can be a risky business in the US since there are probably more folks who speak Classical Arabic than speak the current Egyptian version.
Problem was their "help" simply wasn't competent to handle their particular problem.
Their first "mistake" was leaving the airport. Now, why on earth would they leave the airport if the only way to get to their school in Montana was by plane?
Maybe they are Mormons :-)
They could have notified the school in Montana.
They did not.
They could have gotten unlost.
They did not.
You are making up all kinds of "what ifs" without knowing, when the FACT is that they were missing for a week.
LOL. Don't you get it, they are from Egypt, and there is a river running through their country?
So, to theorize a bit more about this, I put myself in their shoes. If I entered a country with other Americans on the same flight for the same school in a remote part of the country, and then I went off on my own while others went all kinds of other directions, and I did not ask for the slightest help to get me oriented back to my approved destination, I would be harboring nothing but a nefarious intent.
And that is what each of these 11 young men did.
I doubt they are upstanding young people. And I strongly suspect they had other operational plans, and are part of a terror or testing (dry run) network, being run out of Egypt and in concert with al-Qaeda, or some other radical islamic group.
I'e already demonstrated that if they called the school phone number that they used in Egypt it wouldn't work. I've also demonstrated that if they sought help from Arabic speaking individuals, they could very well end up the way they did without any "ifs" at all.
We must not discount the possibility that these guys got cheated out of their plane tickets and money by unscrupulous cab drivers.
So they couldn't ask these cab drivers how to dial a phone? LOL.
See post #71.
Maybe they did ~ and the cab driver lied, or didn't understand why anyone would have such a problem, or, they didn't realize the number wouldn't work here.
Hahahha! Again, see post #71.
Absolutely, I agree 100%. There is no excuse for this. None whatsoever.
If the last one to be found is dyslexic maybe they should look in New Mexico.
OMG. You have to be pulling our legs. Right?
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