Mosque imam in Ohio deported

Mosque ex-leader Damra deported to Middle East

The former leader of Ohio's largest mosque was deported to the Middle East on Thursday, ending a nearly two-year battle to force Fawaz Damra out of the United States.

Damra, 46, flew with agents from the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from Detroit to Newark, N.J., to Amman, Jordan, said ICE spokesman Tim Counts.

"It happened Thursday morning about 4 or 5 a.m.," Counts said Friday. "He was flown into Jordan and from there crossed the bridge into the Palestinian territories."

Damra, the longtime leader of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, had agreed to be deported after a trial and conviction linking him to terrorist groups.

Friends and relatives said Friday that the suddenness of the departure surprised them, and they expressed alarm that they still had not heard from Damra by late Friday.

Nesreen Damra, Fawaz's wife and mother of their three American-born children, declined to comment, but friends described her as anxious and distraught.

"For two, three days she didn't know where her husband was. She still doesn't know," said Haider Alawan, an elder at the Parma mosque and a friend of the Damra family's. "Everything is running through her head. What do you do now?"

Damra was in jail in Michigan more than a year as federal officials searched for a country willing to take him.No one wanted him.

He had been convicted in June 2004 of lying on his citizenship application because he did not disclose his links to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations.

At his trial in U.S. District Court, prosecutors played a video from 1991.

It showed Damra at a Muslim gathering in Cleveland, disparaging Jews in Arabic as "pigs and monkeys" and raising money for the killing of Jews by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Damra's arrest and the images on the videotape shocked many in the region, who viewed him as a voice of moderate, mainstream Islam.

Until the tape surfaced, Damra was often seen at public events with politicians and leaders of other faiths, including several prayer services after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Al-Akhras said he suspects Damra received especially harsh treatment because he is an Arab and a Muslim in a country where both cultures are suspect.

But others say Damra's sins proved hard to forgive, no matter his religious or ethnic background.

"This was more than saying bad things. This was taking actions to essentially support terrorism," said Alan Melamed, president of the Cleveland chapter of the American Jewish Committee, which enjoyed amiable relations with Damra before his past came to light.

Melamed said Damra never directly apologized to Cleveland Jews, leading many to suspect the sincerity of his repentance.

Damra was born in the West Bank town of Nablus. He came to the United States in 1988 and in 1991 was hired as imam, or spiritual leader, of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, in Parma. He denied any links to terror groups on his citizenship application.

ICE officials said they do not know where in the West Bank Damra might be. Damra has family in Nablus, but Muslim civic leaders in Cleveland said on Friday that no one on either side of the ocean had heard from him.

All arrangements for Damra's deportation were worked out with officials from the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, said Counts, the ICE spokesman. He said Damra was turned over to Palestinian officials after crossing the Allenby Bridge that links Jordan and the West Bank.

But that bridge, called the Al-Karameh Bridge by Palestinians, is controlled by the Israelis, noted Julia Shearson, director of the Cleveland office of CAIR.