Move to deport Egyptian raises an issue of torture

Sameh Khouzam's defenders say he is a gentle giant, a devout Christian from a mostly Muslim land where he was persecuted by state-security agents and tortured.

To U.S. immigration officials who want Khouzam, 38, deported, the 6-foot-4, 200-plus-pound accountant now imprisoned in the York County jail is a murderer, convicted in absentia in his native Egypt, where he bludgeoned a woman to death.

What is the truth, and why has his case taken almost a decade to play out since the February morning he landed in America - bandaged, with a badly cut right hand - at John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1998?

Don't expect all the answers from the federal district court in Scranton, which two weeks ago heard arguments on a narrow set of issues in this tale tinged with international intrigue.

There, before Judge Thomas Vanaskie, the focus was on Khouzam's contention that the murder charge is fabricated and that he will be tortured if sent back to Egypt, despite "diplomatic assurances" - from the government of Egypt to the State Department - not to mistreat him.

Khouzam's supporters say Egypt's record on human rights is amply documented by the State Department's annual reports, which detail instances of Egyptian authorities' using stripping, beating, electrical shocks, and sexual assaults on prisoners.

Overarching this high-profile case are twin tests: of America's commitment to the U.N.-sponsored international Convention Against Torture, and of the Bush administration's contention that some executive branch decisions should be unreviewable by the courts.

"This was a direct government-to-government action," said Justice Department attorney Douglas Ginsburg, adding that scrutinizing such actions "is not judicially manageable."

Concerning Egypt's assurances, he said: "The United States sometimes deals with countries that may not have government systems as admirable as ours. Does that mean they never do what we ask?"

Khouzam's lead lawyer, Amrit Singh of the American Civil Liberties Union's national immigrants' rights project, countered: "The government has not done anything to test the Egyptian assurances."

With much at stake, the case has drawn a strange-bedfellows coalition of groups and individuals.

In one odd-couple pairing, Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey both are in Khouzam's corner.

"It is deeply disturbing that the U.S. Department of State and Department of Homeland Security would, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, accept at face value a promise from the Egyptian government," Pitts said in a speech to Congress.

Casey weighed in with a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

"The accusation of murder . . . is a very serious matter, but I am troubled by the lack of due process," he wrote. "The Egyptian government has never provided credible evidence, including autopsy reports, regarding this allegation. . . . "

The missing autopsy report is just one cloud obscuring a case in which almost every important detail is in dispute.

To begin with, there is the story Khouzam tells. As recounted here, it is drawn from U.S. court pleadings, expert testimony, and the contemporaneous notes of Amnesty International volunteer Kathleen Lucas, a York woman who met Khouzam at the county jail in 1999.

Khouzam insists he was running away from anti-Christian persecution, not Egyptian law, when he fled Cairo aboard a middle-of-the-night TWA flight on Feb. 11, 1998.

The youngest of three children from a well-to-do Coptic Christian family, he and several relatives were targeted for forced conversion to Islam, he said, by a shadowy branch of the Egyptian Interior Ministry. Khouzam resisted, which led to roustings and police interrogations during which, he said, he was beaten, stabbed with a screwdriver, and sodomized with a rubber hose.

Karim Haggag, a spokesman for the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, said the case had "nothing to do with the issue of torture in Egypt. It is a purely criminal case."

In another twist, Khouzam, whose record of employment includes jobs in Cairo with a U.S. accounting firm, the U.S. Embassy's security force, and the American University of Cairo, says the family of a Muslim woman he once worked with tried to force him to marry her as a way of effecting his conversion.

During a climactic confrontation with the woman's mother, Khouzam says, she threw a glass vase at him, slicing a tendon in his right hand. He escaped police custody when he was taken to the hospital. Within hours he hopped the flight to New York.

Egyptian authorities tell a very different story.

According to court filings and an article in the pro-government newspaper Rosa al Yousef, Khouzam had an affair with his onetime colleague. When the woman's mother, Zaki Mohammed Youssef, 59, intervened, Khouzam killed her with a blow to the head - from a glass vase.

Like the facts underpinning Khouzam's case, the legal record is replete with conflicting statements, leaving supporters and detractors to choose the parts of the paper trail that suit their narrative.

In February, 2004, for example, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote: "We are firmly persuaded that the provisions of the CAT [Convention Against Torture] have been shamefully trampled upon by the Egyptian police."

Earlier, an immigration judge ruled that "the evidence is overwhelming that [Khouzam] will more likely than not be subjected to torture" if returned to Egypt. At the same time, that judge found "substantial grounds" to believe Khouzam had committed the murder.

In February 2006, Khouzam won a petition for conditional release and moved to Pennsylvania. There, through Boyd/Wilson Property Management president Frank Barrett, whom Khouzam met attending church in York, he was offered a job in the company's Lancaster branch.

For almost a year, Khouzam commuted to work and relished his freedom.

But on May 29, he was detained by authorities and told his deferral had been terminated based on diplomatic assurances from Egypt that he would not be tortured.

His lawyers filed an emergency petition that resulted in a temporary reinstatement of the deferral.

After oral arguments on Aug. 30, Vanaskie took the matter under advisement.

For the moment, his words reinstating the June 15 stay of removal hold sway: "While Khouzam may have no right to be in the United States, he most assuredly has a right not to be tortured."