End the student visa program for students from Saudi Arabia.
Via Oregon Live:
A black SUV pulled up to Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah’s home in Southeast Portland two weeks before his June 2017 trial.
Noorah, a Saudi national charged the year before in the fatal hit-and-run of a teenage girl crossing Hawthorne Boulevard, had a bag packed that Saturday afternoon.
The private car drove the 21-year-old Portland Community College student to a sand-and-gravel yard two miles away.
That’s where Noorah sliced off the tracking monitor he had worn around his ankle for months, according to interviews with federal authorities. He then discarded it at the scene before vanishing, leaving a victim’s family crushed and prosecutors furious and flummoxed.
Law enforcement officials now say they believe Noorah got an illicit passport and boarded a plane — likely a private carrier — to flee the country.
Despite unknowns in the ongoing investigation, officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals Service are all but certain who helped orchestrate the remarkable escape: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
U.S. officials learned only recently from the Saudi government that Noorah arrived back home 18 months ago.
“We’re doing everything we can to get him back,” said Eric Wahlstrom, a supervisory deputy U.S. marshal in Oregon.
Prosecutors still hope to try Noorah in the death of 15-year-old Fallon Smart.
But the efforts might not amount to much.
The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have no extradition treaty, which means an arrest of Noorah inside the kingdom is unlikely. Nor have federal officers confirmed the young man’s precise whereabouts within the Middle East nation.
The new details emerged amid mounting scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s conduct abroad following the kingdom’s role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey this fall. Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, according to Turkish officials.
“It begs the question: Why isn’t the Saudi government respecting our justice system?” said Chris Larsen, a lawyer for Smart’s mother, Fawn Lengvenis. “It’s reprehensible.”
The Saudi government has routinely worked to help its citizens facing criminal charges in the U.S., just as the United States helps its own citizens abroad. Some helped by the Saudis later attempted or succeeded in fleeing the country.
Its consulate posted a $100,000 bail for a Saudi national accused of rape in Utah in 2015. Police later arrested the suspect, Monsour Alshammari, at the U.S.-Mexico border and he was sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to the charge, according to court records and media reports.
Federal court records in Oregon show the Saudi government also bailed out Ali Hussain Alhamoud from the Lincoln County Jail in 2012 after he was indicted on multiple sex crime charges, including first-degree rape.
Alhamoud, who records show was living in Corvallis at the time, managed to board a plane in Portland on the same day he was released and returned to Saudi Arabia, according to a criminal complaint. His case, previously unreported, remains open in Lincoln County.