A man who met with two Sept. 11 hijackers before they crashed an American Airlines jet into the Pentagon has been deported from San Diego to Algeria, the Department of Homeland Security said Friday.
Samir Abdoun, 38, was arrested 11 days after the 2001 attacks and convicted of immigration and passport violations and Social Security fraud, according to Homeland Security.
He had met with hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, according to Homeland Security, and lived in San Diego with four men who were arrested as material witnesses in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77.
Abdoun met the two hijackers for coffee several times but was never arrested as a material witness, said Lauren Mack, a department spokeswoman. He told federal agents that he was not friends with them, she said. "He moved in the same circles as the 9/11 hijackers," said Ron Smith, field office director for detention and removal operations in San Diego.
Armed federal agents escorted Abdoun onto a commercial flight Thursday in San Diego and he arrived Friday in Algeria, where authorities took him into custody, Mack said. Abdoun entered the United States in August 1998 by presenting a false French passport in Los Angeles, Homeland Security said. Border Patrol agents first arrested him in November 1998 at a checkpoint on Interstate 5 in San Clemente, but he failed to appear at deportation proceedings. |