Pakistani Cleric Agrees to Leave U.S.

A Pakistani cleric being held on immigration charges agreed Monday to be deported a week after U.S. law enforcement officials said he was plotting to set up a radical religious school in Lodi to train potential terrorists to attack Americans.

Shabbir Ahmed, 39, the former imam of a mosque in the San Joaquin Valley, was being detained for overstaying his three-year religious workers visa, not on terrorism-related charges.

He was ordered “removed to Pakistan” by Immigration Judge Anthony S. Murry, who during a custody hearing last week described Ahmed as “a danger to the community” and denied him bail.

Ahmed’s attorney, Saad Ahmad, pointed to the lack of criminal charges and the government’s willingness to allow Ahmed to leave as proof of his client’s innocence of plotting acts of terror.

He said Ahmed had decided to voluntarily return home after it became clear he would never be granted bail, and after weighing the severity of the accusations against him.

“Based on the allegations by the government, no matter how baseless they are, and the fact that there is long-term detention while the case proceeds, my client thought that there wasn’t anything to fight for,” said Ahmad, following a hearing that lasted less than five minutes in Murry’s courtroom. “It was time to leave the country.”

Officials from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hailed Ahmed’s decision to accept deportation as a victory for the agency and for citizens in Northern California.

“Mr. Ahmed will no longer be in a position to advance any doctrine of hate from within our community,” Ronald E. Le Fevre, the agency’s chief counsel in San Francisco, told reporters after the hearing.

When pressed about the lack of criminal charges against Ahmed and the possibility that such an individual would now be free to propagate violence against the U.S. from abroad, Le Fevre cut short the news conference.

“He will not be able to do so in the same way or as easily,” Le Fevre said before leaving the room.

Minutes earlier, Le Fevre said the immigration proceeding was the best way for the government to protect U.S. citizens.

“We collectively determined that the best course of action was to use our immigration authorities to remove an individual who is in this country illegally and has been found to pose a threat,” Le Fevre said.

During Ahmed’s custody hearing last week, an FBI agent testified that the Islamic cleric and others were in the preliminary stages of setting up a madrassa, or religious school, in Lodi similar to one in Pakistan, where he had previously worked.

That institution was notorious for training people to engage in jihad, or holy war, immigration officials said.

The FBI agent did not give details of the alleged U.S. attack plan, but named Ahmed as an intermediary for Osama bin Laden and other terrorists.

Ahmed was arrested June 6. His decision to voluntarily depart the U.S. marks the second time in a month that individuals held in connection with possible terrorist activity in Lodi have agreed to be deported, even though there have been no terrorism charges filed against them.

Mohammad Adil Khan, 47, an Islamic religious leader, and his son Mohammad Hassan Adil, 19, also were arrested in June for overstaying their religious worker visas. Ahmad, also the pair’s lawyer, said they departed Monday morning for the Pakistani city of Karachi.

Ahmed would return to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, where he has a wife and three daughters, Ahmad said.

Two other Lodi men, Umer Hayat, 47, and his son Hamid Hayat, 22, are charged with lying to federal officials about the younger Hayat’s attendance at a terrorism training camp in Pakistan in 2003 and 2004. The men, both American citizens, are being held pending the outcome of the criminal prosecution, immigration officials said.

According to testimony from U.S. law enforcement agents during Ahmed’s bond hearing last week, the Hayats told authorities that orders for a terrorist attack in America were to be relayed through Ahmed.

Ahmed has acknowledged that he made anti-American speeches before coming to the San Francisco in January 2002, to assume a position as imam of a Lodi mosque that is the center of religious life for the Central Valley’s burgeoning Pakistani American community.

“I was trying to put pressure on the United States to stop the bombing [in Afghanistan],” Ahmed said at a court hearing in June.

But the cleric insisted that his opinion of America changed after he arrived in the country.

Ahmad, the attorney, continues to maintain that his client is no terrorist. He blamed internal divisions within Lodi’s Muslim community for fostering the investigation.

“There were informants in the mosque -- no doubt about it,” Ahmad said. “Because there was an internal conflict in the mosque, the government used that.”

The terrorism controversy has rattled many residents of Lodi, an agricultural town of 62,000 about 30 miles south of Sacramento. This summer, members of the mosque’s leadership fired Ahmed from his position and now face a lawsuit brought by his supporters.

Proponents of Ahmed described his impending departure, and the removal of the Khans, as a sad day for civil liberties in the U.S., with dangerous implications for other Muslims.

“Sufficient evidence was not provided and the Muslim community is concerned about that,” Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Council on Islamic American Relations’ Sacramento Valley chapter, said of the government’s case against Ahmed. “Now anybody can be labeled a supporter of terrorism without evidence.”

Immigration regulations bar Ahmed from returning to the U.S. for 10 years, but Ahmad said the cleric was unlikely to ever return to America -- a country he still loves -- because his reputation had been tarnished beyond repair. Ahmed also feared for his safety, the attorney said.

“His life as he knew it in this country was over for all practical purposes,” Ahmad said. “In the 1950s, the worst thing you could say to someone was to say that they were a Communist. Nowadays, it’s Islamic fundamentalism.”

Lee Romney reported from San Francisco, Ann M. Simmons from Los Angeles.