SAN DIEGO (U-WIRE) -- A San Diego State University student, currently detained by the federal government, will testify in front of a New York grand jury because of his possible connection to the suspected perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Another witness in the case is an SDSU applicant.
Mohdar Adbullah is a pre-business management student at SDSU. He's been a student since summer session this year.
Yazeed Saad Alsali, currently a student at Grossmont Community College, applied to attend SDSU in spring 2002.
Adbullah and Alsali were arrested last weekend, along with Grossmont Community College student Osama "Sam" Awadallah, for having ties to the suspected hijackers who crashed a plane into the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
U.S. District Judge Ruben Brooks ruled Tuesday that the men will remain in custody indefinitely, even though they are not charged with a crime. They will most likely be taken to New York to appear before a federal grand jury.
Specifying national security concerns, Brooks has sealed all the court proceedings, barred media from the courtroom and enacted a gag order on attorneys.
Randall Hamud, the attorney for the three men, told media representatives after the ruling Tuesday that his clients are innocent victims of a national witch hunt targeting Middle Easterners, a hunt that endangers American civil rights.
However, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that before the gag order, Hamud said his clients, all in their 20s, were acquaintances of one of the suspected hijackers, Nawaf Alhamzi. He also said his clients voluntarily gave interviews to the FBI.
Alhamzi, Hani Hanjoor and Khalid Al-Midhar have been identified as the three hijackers aboard the American Airlines flight. All three lived in the Parkwood Apartments in Clairemont during the first half of 2000, before Alhamzi and Al-Midhar rented a room with local Muslim leader Abdussattar Shaikh, who said he thought he was renting rooms to students in need.
However, law enforcement officials say there are stronger connections. Alsali rented a room at Shaikh's house at the same time as the two suspected hijackers.
Abdullah and Alsali lived at the Southridge Apartments on Saranac Street in La Mesa at various times during the last few years.
In the short time he was on campus, Abdullah made few strong impressions.
Until Abdullah's arrest last weekend, he was simply a Muslim student. Akram Bassyouni, vice president of the Muslim Student Association, met him at a couple of MSA meetings and saw him at a local mosque in La Mesa.
"He seemed like a really nice guy. He goes to school and studies," he said. "Nothing out of the ordinary."
Bassyouni feels that Abdullah and the other recently detained witnesses are being held because of a remote connection to the suspected terrorists -- namely, the fact that one of the men stayed in Shaikh's home, which Bassyouni contends is merely a coincidence.
"They don't have any evidence on him," he said.
Bassyouni pointed out that there are still 600 Muslims missing beneath the wreckage of the World Trade Center, and in a time of mourning, the Muslim community is dealing with the loss of thousands of American citizens, but also with the frustrating side effects of the disaster.
"We're kind of shocked and saddened by the way that some of the American public is pointing fingers at Muslims or Arabs or Middle Easterners just because of something that some people are suspected of doing," he said.
If Abdullah is released by the FBI, he would have the option of returning to SDSU, where the stigma of his arrest could follow him.
"He's gonna be targeted," Bassyouni said. "They've connected him to something so horrible and so inhumane. But it's not just him.... They're branding and connecting all Muslims to something so un-Islamic and something our religion is totally against."
Even before Abdullah's arrest, Muslims on campus felt uncomfortable. Some stayed home. Others attempted to conceal their ethnicity to avoid possible backlash from other students. But the recent arrest of Abdullah threatens to bring the problem even closer to campus.
Bassyouni expressed concern that students will automatically consider Abdullah a terrorist and begin to associate other Muslim students with the attack.
"The right approach to this is not to reply to terror with more terror," he said. "I just want to make sure that nobody gets wrongfully accused or gets treated unjustly. The foundation that this country is built on is totally against that. We're supposed to all have our rights and those can't be taken away from us under any circumstances."
The cases can still be appealed, but that must be done in New York.
After the names of the three men surfaced earlier this week, there was confusion as to Abdullah's and Alsali's link to SDSU.
SDSU's office of Marketing and Communication denied their enrollment at the university, but it released a statement Tuesday confirming that Abdullah was a current student and Alsali had applied to the school.
Jason Foster, SDSU's media relations manager, said confusion from the first statement was caused by the misspelling of the detainee's names.
"We could not find evidence they were students, so we released a statement," he said.
After using additional spellings and cross checking the names with addresses, they discovered the men's connections to the school.
Foster said the school is working with law enforcement agencies. The FBI was on campus last week requesting admission records for the men.
Officials at the International Student Center said Abdullah is a Somalia refugee and a legal resident of the United States. Alsali is from Saudi Arabia.
Currently about 350 people are being held as material witnesses across the nation.
