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Posted on 11/16/2001 1:22:53 PM PST by dawn53

Three Florida flight school students ordered out of U.S.

The Tunisians are not accused of any connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. They say the schools misinformed them about immigration rules.

©Associated Press November 16, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Three Tunisians attending flight schools in Florida, including a student who acknowledged knowing a roommate of terrorist hijacker Mohamed Atta, were ordered deported Thursday.

None of the students were accused of being connected to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The FBI noted in a letter, however, that Maryem Bedoui, 21, had attended flight schools in Venice and Punta Gorda about the same time that hijackers Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi had trained at a nearby flight school.

During a deportation hearing on immigration violations in Bradenton, Bedoui told Immigration Judge R. Kevin McHugh that she was friends with one of Atta's roommates but denied knowing Atta.

The FBI also raised questions about a nighttime landing Bedoui made during a solo flight at a Lockheed Martin airstrip near Orlando about two weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. The facility was closed and Bedoui spent the night there in her plane. Bedoui told the judge that she had run out of fuel and landed there rather than risk crashing.

The immigration judge ordered Mohamed Kharbech and Nabil Ferchichi, both of whom had been in the United States about a year, to leave by the end of the month. Bedoui also was ordered deported once a shoplifting charge against her is resolved.

"In ordinary times this may not be such a big thing," the judge said during the deportation hearing. "But these are not ordinary times."

All three said they were the victims of flight schools that misinformed them of immigration rules and took tens of thousands of dollars without providing training.

In Virginia, an attorney said his Saudi client who was arrested the night of Sept. 11 near Dulles Airport, where one of the hijackers' flights originated, will plead guilty to a criminal charge that has nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.

The government is dropping a second charge and Khalid al-Draibi would spend only a few months in jail under federal sentencing guidelines after he pleads guilty Monday in Alexandria, Va., said attorney Drew Hutcheson Jr.

Al-Draibi passed two FBI polygraph examinations in which he denied any links to terrorists and denied knowing anything about the Sept. 11 attacks, said Hutcheson.

Police pulled him over for driving on a bare wheel rim 13 miles south of Dulles, from which American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, had taken off earlier in the day. Flight manuals were found in al-Draibi's car, and he carried drivers' licenses from eight states. Hutcheson said the plea will be to a charge of making a false statement on a visa application. Al-Draibi has been in custody since Sept. 11.

In other developments: An Egyptian man in Evansville, Ind., faces deportation, a month after a tip by his American wife reportedly led authorities to detain him and eight others. Fathey Saleh Abdelkhalek was arrested after his wife called authorities and said her husband was suicidal and threatened to die in a crash, according to the Evansville Courier & Press. Hafath Twymon, the spokesman for the Evansville mosque where the men worshiped, said Abdelkhalek's wife refused to sign documents that would allow him to stay in the United States. "He's been under so much pressure now, he asked to be deported," Twymon said. "He wants out."

A federal grand jury met in connection with Tuesday's 13-hour search by the FBI and hazardous materials teams of two Chester, Pa., homes. One residence was the home of Chester city accountant Asif Kazi. The other building has an office rented by an area medical group and a residence shared by city health commissioner Irshad Shaikh and his brother Masood Shaikh, who works for the city's lead abatement program. Delaware County District Attorney Patricia Holsten confirmed the grand jury session.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement commissioner Tim Moore says the FBI is not sharing information needed to fight terrorism. "We have received limited information and few requests for assistance since the initial terrorism leads were developed," Moore said in a letter to FBI director Robert Mueller and homeland security director Tom Ridge.

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