Egyptian-Muslim-American Professor Arrested in Cairo on arrival from JFK/NYC

Boker tov, Boulder!

Punchline first this time: 

"US officials said there had been no security lapse."

     
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ~ photo courtesy of First In

Kudos to Atlas, who works so much and so hard every day to catch the stories most will never see.  Here she asks, "Want this teaching your kid?"

CAIRO —  Egyptian authorities detained a passenger arriving from New York's JFK airport Wednesday with handguns, ammunition and knives in his bag, but US officials said there had been no security lapse.
Mohamed Ibrahim Marei, a US university professor of Egyptian origin, arrived on EgyptAir flight 986 from John F. Kennedy Airport.
Customs officials in Cairo checked his luggage because he looked nervous, and found two handguns and 250 rounds of ammunition hidden in metal boxes, an Egyptian official said on condition of anonymity.
In a secret compartment in the bag, authorities also found two swords, five daggers and six knives, the official added....

There is one Mahmud Marei listed in the White Pages - just blocks from Times Square - but another account reports the name as Mohamed Ibrahim Khalf, and still others say the man is a botany professor.  Meanwhile, I can't find any botany professors by either name at any American university. 

A google search did turn up this, which may or may not prove to be relevant. 

ʿAlī ibn Khalaf is known for his work on “universal instruments.” No details of his biography are known. In Arabic sources, he is only mentioned by Sāʿid al‐Andalusī in his Ṭabaqāt as an outstanding geometer, who belonged, along with Zarqālī, to a group of young Toledan scholars interested in philosophy.

There are several variants of his name. A footnote in Bū ʿAlwān's edition of the Tabaqāt gives ʿAlī ibn Khalaf ibn Aḥmar Akhīr (or Akhiyar) al‐Saydalānī. A very similar reading quoted by an anonymous Egyptian 14th‐century source... is Abū al‐Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Khalaf ibn Akhir (or Akhyar) bearing the title al‐Shajjārī, the botanist.

Then there is an S.A. Khalaf on the Faculty of Science, Botany Department, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt, mentioned in the (2002) Chemical Abstracts of the American Chemical Society -- but hey, I'm sure Khalaf is a pretty common name, as it sounds a lot like Caliph.

Never fear, Janet Napolitano probably has her minions googling madly at this very moment. What could go wrong?

Posted by Yael at 02:56 PM