From the San Francisco Chronicle, with thanks to Skeet Street.
A Muslim cleric with ties to Lodi men caught up in an FBI terrorism investigation agreed Friday to be deported to his native Pakistan along with his son rather than fight government immigration charges.
Mohammad Adil Khan, 47, and his son, Mohammad Hassan Adil, 19, had been accused of overstaying their visas, and Adil Khan was charged with coming to the United States under false pretenses…
Another Muslim cleric from Lodi embroiled in the FBI probe, Shabbir Ahmed, is fighting deportation.
Federal authorities said little about the deal in which Adil Khan and his son agreed to deportation, other than a statement by San Francisco branch chief counsel Ronald Le Fevre of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“ICE will not allow foreign nationals to use the United States as a haven for activities that potentially put our nation or other nations at risk,” Le Fevre said…
Adil Khan has a reputation for being a charismatic speaker and prolific fund-raiser in the Muslim community. He made several visits to the United States in the 1990s to raise money for a madrassa, or religious school, in Pakistan called Jamia Farooqia University, which his father co-founded and where Ahmed was a former student of Adil Khan’s…
At one point, however, Adil Khan and Ahmed were both imams at the Lodi Muslim Mosque, where Umer and Hamid Hayat [the accused father-son jihadis] worshiped…
Government lawyers pointed out that the Jamia Farooqia madrassa, where Ahmed taught for 11 years after studying under Adil Khan, had produced a number of students who went to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet occupation and later on behalf of the fundamentalist Taliban.
Ahmed said he had been too preoccupied with his studies to have any interest in going to Afghanistan. But he acknowledged that Adil Khan had, for a time, been a close friend of a Taliban leader.