Terror arrest haunts family

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2008 | 2 a.m.

After the German businessman was arrested at McCarran International Airport in late December 2006, federal and North Las Vegas authorities strip-searched him, withheld his heart medicine for 36 hours and kept him in jail for four days and three nights before forcing him to return to Europe.

No criminal charges were ever filed against him, and his wife says she was told last year that it was all a terrorism watch-list mistake. But it apparently has yet to be corrected, continues to sully Mohamed Majed Chehade Refai’s reputation and makes it impossible for him to visit his daughter in California, so he is suing in federal court in Las Vegas.

Peter Ashman, a local immigration attorney representing Chehade, said the case also highlights a larger issue: “The government is keeping details on us, and we don’t have access to any of those details.”

Chehade, 63, is married to a Massachusetts-born former math teacher and has three children who are U.S. citizens. He has owned a home on the East Coast for 20 years and has visited this country dozens of times.

But on his last visit, U.S. authorities apparently suspected he might be tied to terrorism. Chehade was subjected to a body cavity search and was interrogated by a Homeland Security Department official who asked whether he knew who had killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, the lawsuit filed in August says. Chehade is of Syrian descent, and at one point, a jail officer shouted into Chehade’s cell, “You, Syrian, come here,” according to the lawsuit.

Officials also suggested he would be able to return to the United States after his release only if he spied for the government, the lawsuit and Chehade’s wife, Joanne Mulligan, allege.

Seven months later, Mulligan was returning to Germany from a visit to her ailing mother in Massachusetts when an FBI agent and a state trooper stopped her at Logan International Airport, according to the lawsuit. They told her “a very big mistake had happened” with her husband, Mulligan said. They said his name was mistakenly put on the terrorism watch list, according to Mulligan. They also said the problem had been fixed, she said.

This spring, Chehade applied for a visa allowing him to return to the United States. The paperwork is normally not necessary for German nationals because they can obtain a visa waiver. But because Chehade had been denied entry to the United States, the visa was needed so the man and his family could resume their normal life.

The U.S. Embassy in Germany denied the application March 13.

By this time, the German national press had covered the case, deepening the psychological damage to her husband and their family, as well as causing economic damage to his export business, Mulligan said.

“People were afraid to talk to him because they thought they might be put on a list,” she said.

So they filed the lawsuit, she said, “because we have no other alternative.”

Trevor D. Dryer, a San Francisco-based attorney representing Chehade, said the case raises concerns about whether the federal government is engaging in racial profiling in the name of combating terrorism. And, he said, the federal government’s own rules prohibit it from treating immigration detainees the way officials treated Chehade in jail.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration Customs and Enforcement, said she couldn’t address the specifics of Chehade’s case.

Detective Mark Hoyt, until recently spokesman for the North Las Vegas Police Department, said the case was similar to others filed by “people who don’t like it because the jail is not their couch and not their home.”

“People complain about this all the time,” he said. “They call it mistreatment, but it’s not.”

Mulligan, 57, calls it “Big Brother” at its worst.

“You could never believe this could happen” in the United States, she said. But, she added, she has talked to others who have been through similar cases of mistaken identity and unexplained detention.

“I hope that this lawsuit could make a difference for other families who have gone through the same thing,” she said.

“We should be ashamed that the American government would do something like this.”