“If they would’ve just given me a call, I would’ve taken a flight to Boise,” he said. “But they didn’t.”… “Everybody was looking at me like they just captured a terrorist right there in Dulles airport,” he said. “I mean, here I am, dressed in Muslim garb and I have my beard…”
Abdullah al-Kidd approached the Dulles International Airport ticket counter in March 2003 expecting to catch a flight to Saudi Arabia to study Arabic and Islamic law.
Instead, federal agents slapped handcuffs on the Kansas-born former University of Idaho running back.
He spent the next 16 days in three jails without criminal charges on a warrant as a potential witness in a terrorism-related case. He was shackled, strip-searched and confined in a cell.
The government’s case eventually fell apart, but not before the husband and father had lost his family and livelihood.[…]
Kidd, who was born Lavoni T. Kidd to a Christian family in Wichita, Kan., moved to Saudi Arabia seven years ago to get away from what he called the post-9/11 “culture” in the U.S.
Kidd’s father, a retired California corrections officer, said the ordeal changed his son, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdullah while in college in the mid-1990s.
“He was really kind of wound pretty tight,” Cecil Kidd, of San Bernardino, Calif., said about his son’s behavior after the arrest. “He was paranoid. Always thought someone was following him, and probably they were. He was jumpy at noises, always looking out windows. He was just out there all alone, and he was really afraid.”[…]
Kidd was arrested to testify against Sami Omar al-Hussayen, a Saudi immigrant in Idaho. Hussayen allegedly was associated with financial transactions and websites linked to “radical Islamic ideologues who advocated terrorism,” according to government documents.[…]
In the Kidd case, the inspector general noted, FBI agents found a CD-ROM titled “19 Martyrs” among his belongings. They watched it with Kidd on his laptop and considered it a “video tribute” to the Sept. 11 hijackers, most of them from Saudi Arabia.
Kidd said he was bringing the video to show Saudi religious leaders how “to refute” those who would praise the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Today, Kidd said he is trying to move on. He has kept his American citizenship, but has found peace in a new home, with a new wife and family, where he can openly embrace Islam without fear.