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Mohamed's Jail Cell Stark Contrast To Elite Home Life

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By LIAM STACK, Special to the Tribune

Published: September 15, 2007

CAIRO, Egypt - The Heliopolis Club is an oasis of leafy green calm in the heart of the congested but upscale Cairo suburb of Heliopolis.

The address is one of the city's most elite. It is home to gracious villas with luxury cars parked out front, boutiques that sell Gucci head scarves and the heavily guarded palace of President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt with an iron fist since 1981.

It is also home to the family of Ahmed Mohamed, a 26-year-old student at the University of South Florida, now in the Falkenburg Road Jail, indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of trying to help terrorists by aiding, teaching and demonstrating the use of an explosive device as well as transporting explosives.

Organizations like the Heliopolis Club are an institution in the life of upper-class Egyptians, who can slip inside their gates to escape from the noise and crowding of this city of 18 million.

Few are allowed inside those gates. Membership in such social clubs is hereditary, with children inheriting from parents and spouses marrying into them from families less well-connected.

Inside, children run around jungle gyms and teenagers lounge by the pool while their parents mingle over buffet lines or a game of golf or croquet.

To enroll as a new member, a family must fork over a lump sum of $10,000 and pay an annual fee; this in a country where the average annual income hovers around $800.

Family members say Mohamed was a regular at the club. He liked to spend his days splashing around one of its several pools or playing sports with his friends.

In a country where poverty and illiteracy are endemic, his was a life of privilege and comfort.

That elite world of pool parties and croquet games is far from the Tampa jail cell where he now sits, and his family and peers expressed shock and disbelief at the charges.

'I was surprised to hear about him,' said Maram Mazen, 22, a law graduate from Cairo University. Mazen is a member of the club and lives nearby, but does not know Mohamed personally.

'There is nothing really missing from our lives here,' she said. 'Why would someone ever do something like that? He's not poor, so he has no reason to be angry.'

A Father Of Privilege

Across town lies Ramses Square, the transportation hub of the Egyptian capital. It is a dense knot of highways, overlapping flyovers and foot bridges, and crisscrossing subway and trolley lines wedged between Cairo's cavernous central train station and a patch of sparse grass.

The square swirls with commuters, vendors hawking knock-off designer shades and small glasses of tea, and screaming taxis and shaky microbuses.

On Thursday, the last day before Ramadan, the square was alive with a mass of people hurrying home from work or going to relatives in the countryside to celebrate the beginning of the holy month.

In the center of the rush sits the squat headquarters of the National Authority for Tunnels, the division of the Ministry of Transportation responsible for the network of subways and underground tunnels that cut beneath the city.

On the second floor of this building, beneath a portrait of Mubarak flanked by framed verses from the Quran, sits Abdel Latif Sherif, vice chairman of the authority and father of Ahmed Mohamed.

Sherif, whose name has been reported in the United States erroneously as Abdellatif Mohamed, sits behind a large desk lined with telephones that ring incessantly. A phalanx of assistants, secretaries and well-wishers files in to his office with paperwork to be signed, hands to shake, and best wishes for the approaching holiday.

He is a heavyset man who is by turns distraught and angry about his son's predicament in the United States, but he is unfailingly polite. He receives every visitor, wishes everyone who passes a happy holiday and makes sure his secretary keeps a steady stream of Coca-Cola coming for a visiting foreign reporter.

Sherif is the image of a successful, prosperous government official. Throughout his life, he said, he has given his children every opportunity that his connections can provide. The chance for Mohamed to study in America was just one of those opportunities.

'Ahmed was very, very happy to go to America. His dream was always to go to Europe or America and to study for a Ph.D.,' Sherif said. 'And all of us were happy because he was so happy.'

Mohamed loved the United States, his father said. Even though he had lived there a short time he told his family he had made a lot of friends and felt at home in Tampa.

'He liked Florida very much, and he was very happy there,' Sherif said. 'When his mother or I would say to him, 'Oh, you are living abroad,' he would tell us that he felt like he was living in his own country because he had so many friends there.'

As much as he liked living in Tampa, his goal was always to come home.

'He was happy,' his father said. 'He wanted to come back to us here in Egypt to teach as a full professor in his faculty.'

He was a student at Ain Shams as well and was hired as an engineering instructor after his graduation.

Faith In The Government

In the month since he has been imprisoned, Sherif and his wife have been able to speak to Mohamed once. He sounds well, they say, and he said he has put his faith in God to protect him.

Thanks to his father's connections, though, Mohamed also has more earthly forces coming to his assistance in prison.

Sherif said he has marshaled those connections to help his son in any way possible.

'I contacted lots of high-ranking people that I know in Cairo, and they are doing their best to help us with this matter,' he said. 'I am in contact with them every day, and they are doing more than you can imagine, even as we speak.'

Sherif fervently believes his son is innocent of the terror-related charges filed against him in Tampa and says his son has been caught in a mixed-up case of racial profiling.

'They are only saying he is a terrorist because he had a long beard at the time he was arrested, because he did not shave for maybe two or three days before his vacation,' he said. 'I am sure that he was targeted because of the way that he looks - because he is Arab and wore a long beard.

'If my son looked more like you,' he said, staring across his massive desk at a pale, clean-shaven foreign reporter, 'then he would not be having any of these problems.'

Sherif's confidence in his son's innocence seems to be matched only by his faith in the Egyptian government to bring him home.

'The Egyptian government has helped us so much, especially the Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Higher Education,' he said. 'They have helped us to speak to him in jail, they are helping us get a lawyer, and they will also pay for the lawyer. The government will never leave him. They will do their best to bring our son home.'

In the meantime, Mohamed's arrest has left a wake of sadness and confusion in his Cairo social circle.

As Egyptian families settle in to a season of religious devotion, family dinners and holiday TV specials after a day of fasting, Mohamed's family said they are depressed, angry and afraid to allow their other son to travel abroad.

'Of course, we are suffering, Sherif said, 'my family is in a very bad state.'

Outside the Heliopolis Club, Maram Mazen strikes a similar tone.

'Why would a terrorist ever come from someplace like this?' she said. 'For people who are very poor, I understand why they would be angry enough to do something extreme. But for someone like him, it makes no sense.'

Liam Stack is a Cairo-based reporter.

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