Word: clerics
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...wanted him to surrender at INS headquarters in Manhattan. They compromised on a firehouse across the street from the mosque, where the sheik entered an INS van and was driven to a federal facility in Otisville, New York, about 75 miles northwest of New York City. The blind Egyptian cleric could be held until the resolution of his appeal of a deportation order issued by an immigration judge in March...
...farce began in 1990, when the American Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan issued the blind cleric a visa, somehow overlooking the fact that Rahman was on the United States "watch list"--American intelligence had already marked him as a suspected terrorist...
Salem was part of the inner circle around Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind, fiery Egyptian cleric who has been spiritual mentor both to the accused World Trade Center bombers and to members of the new ring. In fact Salem served for a time as Abdel Rahman's bodyguard. He is said to have turned informant partly for money (the FBI reportedly has recommended that he be given a $250,000 bonus for his help), but largely because he thought terrorist killings were betraying, not furthering, the cause of Islam and were likely to prompt a worldwide backlash against Muslims...
With authorities reluctant to jail the troublesome cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, local politicians are wondering -- Why not kick him out? The answer is, It's not so easy. A year after he entered the U.S. in 1990, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, unaware of his revolutionary past, granted him a "green card," or permanent resident alien status. When the ins found out, it rescinded the card -- and began a nearly interminable process. In March an immigration judge found him deportable; Abdel Rahman appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals in Washington, where a ruling can take from six months...
What's known for certain is that the American embassy in Khartoum gave him a visa in May 1990. This shouldn't have happened: since 1987, the blind Egyptian cleric had been on the State Department's watch list for suspected terrorists. When Sheik Abdel Rahman arrived at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum in May 1990 and asked for a visa, a Sudanese employee checked his name against a list of names on microfiche from the department's Automated Visa Lookout System. The employee said there were no "hits" against the name...