BEIRUT, August 26 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A Florida-based Palestinian professor, detained for five years by the United States without being formally charged with any crime and then deported, is in Lebanon and plans to remain there for 48 hours, friends of his family said Sunday, August 25.

Mazen Al-Najjar, 44, was originally deported abroad a special U.S. immigration department plane to Bahrain but was refused entry there, according to his wife, quoted in the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

After a 25-hour wait in Rome, U.S. officials on the plane noticed he had an entry visa to Lebanon on his passport and flew him to Beirut.

His wife said Najjar was treated U.S. authorities “like a parcel that they wanted to throw out,” while family members said that the professor was planning to leave Lebanon for an unspecified African country within 48 hours.

Najjar was first arrested by the U.S. authorities in May 1997. They accused him of links with the Palestinian movement Islamic Jihad. He was released in December 2000 but was arrested again in November 2001 and held in solitary confinement until his deportation.

Najjar and his brother-in-law Sami Al-Arian, both of whom taught at the University of South Florida in Tampa, were investigated for years on suspicion they had ties to the movement which Washington has listed as an international terrorist group, reported AFP.

U.S. civil liberties groups criticized Friday, August 23, the treatment of the professor, saying his detention for almost five years on secret evidence and without charges was unconstitutional.

Randall Marshall of the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that holding Najjar on secret evidence was unconstitutional and that “the 10 months that he spent in solitary confinement was nothing more than the raw exercise of government power.”

In a statement released Thursday, August 22, Rep. David Bonior (D-MI), a longtime supporter of Muslim and Arab causes, and personally involved in Al-Najjar’s case, said, “The injustice of secret evidence made possible the wrongful jailing of Dr. Al-Najjar and has now culminated in his unjust deportation. 

“We have denied Dr. Al-Najjar his liberty and his rights based on unsubstantiated, secret allegations. This blatant disregard for our constitutional rights and the basic rights of due process has served as the Justice Department’s modus operandi since the beginning of this case. 

“It is reprehensible that Dr. Al-Najjar’s family is being fractured yet again by the Department’s action. The promise of liberty that America has held out to its immigrants for two centuries never included the separation and destruction of the family - that is until now,” Bonior commented, adding, “In a country that has shown compassion in the past by taking in refugees, this deportation - which makes refugees out of American children and their parents - is simply wrong and immoral.”