WASHINGTON, January 17 (Sputnik) — The US government and an FBI agent will compensate Muslim American Abdullah al-Kidd $385,000 as part of a settlement for arresting and torturing him as a material witness without having any basis for holding him, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the group representing al-Kidd announced on Friday.
“As part of the settlement, the federal government offered its regrets and agreed to compensate US citizen Abdullah al-Kidd over his arrest and detention as a material witness in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001,” the ACLU statement read. “The U.S. government and an individual FBI agent named as a defendant also agreed to pay al-Kidd a total of $385,000 as part of the settlement.”
The ACLU said that after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City and the Pentagon, the US government began imprisoning Muslim men as material witnesses without having a reason to hold them.
"The [US] government systematically abused the material witness process after September 11," deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project Lee Gelernt said in a statement. "This settlement [of Al-Kidd] and the court opinions detailing the government’s unlawful actions will hopefully deter future such abuses."
Following the settlement, Kansas-born Al-Kidd said in an ACLU statement that he was pleased the US government had finally acknowledged and compensated him for the trouble that the arrest put him through and hoped that “no one else has to go through what I went through.”
The ACLU’s lawsuit lasted for a decade which included the group going to the US Supreme Court and two other trips to the federal court of appeals.
