After being indicted for allegedly being one of the leaders of the murderous Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and then taking a plea on lesser charges, the former University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian, has been deported to Turkey.

Al-Arian, 57, and his wife, Nahla, boarded a commercial flight out of Washington on Wednesday night, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which did not elaborate. They arrived in Turkey on Thursday morning, said his former attorney, Jonathan Turley.

The long-planned deportation was finally made possible after federal prosecutors last June dropped a criminal contempt indictment against Al-Arian.
A U.S. Department of Justice spokesman declined to comment.

Here is what Al-Arian said in his parting statement:

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“After 40 years, my time in the U.S. has come to an end. Like many immigrants of my generation, I came to the U.S. in 1975 to seek a higher education and greater opportunities,” Al-Arian said. “But I also wanted to live in a free society where freedom of speech, association and religion are not only tolerated but guaranteed and protected under the law.”

“We look forward to the journey ahead and take with us the countless happy memories we formed during our life in the United States,” Al-Arian wrote.

Here is a quick summary of what happened back in 2003:

In 2003, federal prosecutors in Tampa filed an indictment alleging Al-Arian was a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and complicit in the murder of civilians. Al-Arian ended up taking a plea deal on greatly reduced charges after a federal jury in Tampa did not convict him following a lengthy trial.
The deal included a recommendation for time served and immediate deportation — possibly to Egypt, where he lived before he came to the United States.

Specifically, he admitted to conspiring to aid the PIJ by helping a relative with links to the group get immigration benefits.

“Much of the evidence the government presented to the jury during the six-month trial were speeches I delivered, lectures I presented, articles I wrote, magazines I edited, books I owned, conferences I convened, rallies I attended, interviews I gave, news I heard, and websites I never even accessed,” Al-Arian said in Thursday’s statement. “But the most disturbing part of the trial was not that the government offered my speeches, opinions, books, writings, and dreams into evidence, but that an intimidated judicial system allowed them to be admitted into evidence. That’s why we applauded the jury’s verdict.”

But instead of Al-Arian being expelled, the legal drama continued when prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., sought his testimony in a separate investigation there. He refused, saying he had carefully negotiated the Florida plea deal to exclude the usual requirement to cooperate with government investigations. But appellate courts ruled that prosecutors were within their rights to subpoena Al-Arian in the new case.

They sought his testimony in a long-running, terror-related grand jury investigation focusing on a Herndon, Va.,-based organization called the International Institute of Islamic Thought, which was raided by the FBI in 2002 and had provided funding to the think tank Al-Arian founded.