Washington: Badar Khan Suri, who was arrested and kept in federal custody, charged with promoting antisemitism and disseminating Hamas propaganda online, but was released by a US court on Wednesday, said that the authorities made a subhuman of him. He recounted that he was chained, locking his ankles, wrists, and body. According to him, there was no charge or anything, according to NBC News.
Khan Suri is a postdoctoral scholar and professor at Georgetown University and he was released from federal custody by the US District Judge Patricia Giles of the Eastern District of Virginia, ruling that his arrest in March and continued detension at the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas contravened both the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution. The court noted that the government couldn’t provide substantial evidence that Khan Suri posed a flight risk or a danger to the public, NBC reports.
After release, Khan Suri told NBC News, “For the first seven, eight days, I even missed my shadow. It was Kafkaesque, where they were taking me, what they were doing to me. I was chained — my ankles, my wrists, my body. Everything was chained.”
As per court documents, he was lodged in a facility’s TV room without a proper bed and was subjected to a blaring television from 5 am to 2 am. He was served with halal meals only after five days of custody and was placed in the red uniform of high-security detainees.
He said that while he was in custody, what concerned him more was the emotional toll his detention imposed on his children. His wife told him that his elder son, who is nine years old and aware of where his father was, used to cry about him and needed support from mental health, he said.
The US Department of Homeland Security had accused Khan Suri of promoting antisemitism, disseminating Hamas propaganda online and having close connections to a known or suspected terrorist who is a senior advisor to Hamas. However, court documents showed that the said accusations originated from his marriage to Maphaz Ahmad Yousef, who is an American citizen from Gaza and a student at Georgetown. The DHS mentioned suspect is Maphaz’s father, Ahmed Yousef, who used to work as an adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh more than a decade ago. Nowadays, he is a staunch critic of the militant group.