Israelis arrested in Washington cleared by FBI

May. 14, 2002
Israelis arrested in Washington cleared by FBI
By MELISSA RADLER
NEW YORK

Two Israelis who were arrested in Washington State last week, after the moving van they were driving was found to contain traces of explosives, were cleared by the FBI which said previous tests yielded a false positive.

"They did not have explosives on them," said a spokesman at Seattle's FBI office, Ray Lauer.

The Israelis, who were pulled over last week by local police in Oak Harbor, Washington on a speeding violation, were taken into INS custody after it was determined that they were working in the US illegally as movers.

Stopped near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, the duo attracted suspicion after one was found to be carrying an altered Israeli passport and the second had no passport at all.

Stopped close to a military base, Whidbey Island immediately supplied bomb-sniffing dogs and an ionizer to the local police. The dogs and ionizer originally determined that the vehicle was laden with trace amounts of explosives, though further tests conducted a few hours later found that nothing more malignant than diesel fuel was to be found in the vehicle, said Lauer. "The tests that they conducted appear to be false positives," he said.

The Israelis are currently being held on immigration violations, including entering the country illegally and working without proper documentation, said a spokesman at Seattle's INS office.

"The two gentlemen that were stopped were held on immigration violations. They are in the custody of the INS. We are only charging them with immigration violations," said the spokesman.

NO...furniture movers more along this line:

5 Israelis detained for `puzzling behavior' after WTC tragedy

By Yossi Melman

Ha'aretz (Israel); September 17, 2001

Five Israelis who had worked for a moving company based in New Jersey are being held in U.S. prisons for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation has described as "puzzling behavior" following the terror attack on the World

Trade Center in New York last Tuesday. The five are expected to be deported sometime soon.

The families of the five, who asked that their names not be released, said that their sons had been questioned by the FBI for hours on end, had been kept in solitary confinement for three days, and had been humiliated, stripped of their clothes and blindfolded.

The mother of one of the young men explained the chain of events as she understands it to Ha'aretz:

She said that the five had worked for the company, which is owned by an Israeli, for between two months and two years. They had been arrested some four hours after the attack on the Twin Towers while filming the smoking

skyline from the roof of their company's building, she said. It appears that they were spotted by one of the neighbors who called the police and the FBI.

The mother said that the families and friends of the five in Israel had known nothing of the men's whereabouts for a number of days.

"When they finally let my son make a phone call for the first time to a friend in the United States two days ago, he told him that he had been tortured by the FBI in a basement," the mother said. "He was stripped to his underwear; he was blindfolded and questioned for 14 hours. They thought that because he has citizenship of a European country as well as of Israel that he was working for the Mossad [Israel's secret service]."

Seven FBI agents later stormed the apartment of one of the Israelis, searched it and questioned his roommate. The Israeli owner of the company, who has U.S. citizenship, was also questioned. Both men were subsequently

released.

The families here complained that the Israeli consulate in New York and the situation room set up by the Foreign Ministry there to locate missing Israelis had done nothing to help their sons. The Foreign Ministry told the families that the FBI had denied holding the five and that the consulate had chosen to believe the FBI, the mother said.

The five were transferred out of the FBI's facility on Saturday morning and are now being held in two prisons in New Jersey by the Immigration and Naturalization Services. They are charged with illegally residing in the United States and working there without permits.

The Foreign Ministry said in response that it had been informed by the consulate in New York that the FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior." They are said to have had been caught videotaping the disaster and shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery.

I guess nobody's going to be falling all over themselves insisting that these two guys must be Arabs, since it appears there were no explosives.

Palestinians, Israeli Arabs or Israeli Jews, I don't give a sh*t what they are, they still caused an awful lot of trouble with their altered and missing Israeli passports and being in the U.S. illegally.

Kick their asses out, and let us hear no whining from the Israeli press about how these Israelis were treated while in custody, whatever their ethnicity.

NO WHINING!!

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