Tunisians at flight school face deportation

Three Tunisians attending flight schools in Florida, including a student who acknowledged knowing a flatmate of terrorist hijacker Mohamed Atta, were ordered deported yesterday.

None of the students was accused of being connected to the September 11 attacks.

The FBI noted in a letter, however, that Maryem Bedoui, 21, who had attended flight schools in Punta Gorda and Venice, Florida, about the same time that hijackers Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, had trained at a nearby flight school.

During a deportation hearing on immigration violations in Bradenton, Florida, Bedoui told Immigration Judge R Kevin McHugh that she was friends with one of Atta’s flatmates, but denied knowing Atta.

The FBI also raised questions about a night-time landing Bedoui made during a solo flight at a Lockheed Martin airstrip near Orlando about two weeks before the September 11 attacks.

The facility was closed and Bedoui spent the night there in her plane. Bedoui told the judge she had run out of fuel and landed there rather than risk crashing.

The immigration judge ordered Mohamed Kharbech and Nabil Ferchichi, both of whom had been in the United States about a year, to leave by the end of the month.

Bedoui also was ordered deported once a shoplifting charge against her is resolved.

’’In ordinary times, this may not be such a big thing,’’ the judge said during the deportation hearing. ‘‘But these are not ordinary times.’’

All three said they were the victims of flight schools that misinformed them of immigration rules and took tens of thousands of dollars without providing training.

In Virginia, an attorney said his Saudi client who was arrested the night of September 11 near Dulles Airport, where one of the hijackers’ flights originated, will plead guilty to a criminal charge that has nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.

The government is dropping a second charge, and Khalid al-Draibi would spend only a few months in jail under federal sentencing guidelines after he pleads guilty Monday in Alexandria, Virginia, said attorney Drew Hutcheson Jr.

Al-Draibi passed two FBI polygraph examinations in which he denied any links to terrorists and denied knowing anything about the September 11 attacks, said Hutcheson.

Police pulled him over for driving on a bare wheel rim 13 miles south of Dulles, where American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon had taken off earlier in the day.

Flight manuals were found in al-Draibi’s car, and he carried driver’s licences from eight states.

Hutcheson said the plea will be to a charge of making a false statement on a visa application. Al-Draibi has been in custody since September 11.