By Anthony O. Miller
FOR THE ‘crime’ of making a phone call in Arabic, an offshore company’s Saudi Arabia manager was arrested by Immigration Police and — despite being cleared — kept in custody until he could be filmed for commercial television.
Khaled El-Khatib, 28, was in Cyprus on business. He had just used a call box to phone Adel Beyhum, his operations manager at Storck Middle East, a confectionery supplier. It was about 8.30pm last Sunday, and El-Khatib was heading for dinner at a Makarios Avenue café.
“Suddenly a guy was walking beside me and he’s looking at my (shirt) pocket. I thought he wanted my pen or something. I stopped at a shop to look inside. He stopped also.”
Asked what he wanted, the man replied: “Where’s your passport?” El-Khatib told him it was at the Hilton Hotel. “Immediately he put his hands on me and said: ‘I’m the police.'”
El-Khatib admits he did not ask to see the man’s identification card, nor did he resist arrest. He merely accompanied the plainclothes Immigration Police officer to a site in Nicosia’s Old City where other suspected illegal aliens had been rounded up.
“They handcuffed me to an Indian person, and we waited around half an hour until the trucks came,” El-Khatib said.”They put around 30 persons in each, and then we went to the Immigration Office.”
“I showed them my (Hilton room) key, and told them my passport was in the hotel. So they called the hotel, and the reservation desk told them I was in room 368,” he said.
Then another immigration officer verified his passport number “and said everything was OK: I had a visa. They uncuffed me and I thought: ‘OK, I’m leaving,'” El-Khatib said. He was wrong.
Instead he was told: ‘You are not allowed to leave now — wait in the next room for 10 minutes.'” He did, and the 10 minutes became 60. “They kept saying, ‘two minutes; two minutes only.'”
“Every five minutes, I told him: ‘Please, I want to make a call. Everything is OK. I have to be at dinner.’ He kept saying: ‘Two minutes, two minutes only’. So we sat in this room until the TV camera came.”
“Each time I told the officer in charge: ‘I’m a manager. I am going to the Hilton Hotel. Everything is OK,’ he started laughing: ‘You are a manager. OK. Stay two minutes, two minutes.'”
When the TV camera arrived, El-Khatib said he and the other prisoners were led from the detention room to a hallway, where the cameraman filmed them as they passed.
“I told them: ‘It’s not good to show me; I’m a manager. I’m at the Hilton Hotel.'”
El-Khatib is, in fact, Saudi Arabia country manager for Storck Middle East. He is a young, new manager and had been with Storck only 45 days when he was arrested. He was worried his wrongful arrest and any TV broadcast of it might imperil his new job.
Beyhum told The Sunday Mail the footage from the immigration office was shown on Antenna, Sigma, CyBC and Logos. “But he (El-Khatib) was not shown,” Beyhum said. Neither man could explain why not.
“When they stopped him,” said Beyhum, “had they checked all his credentials, checked with the Hilton to see that he’s legally in the country … he should have been set free.”
On learning of El-Khatib’s arrest, Andreas Aristidou, chief of the Immigration Police, agreed with Beyhum: “I believe that we made a mistake,” he said, “because from the time that the officer in charge understood that he was OK, he should have released him at once.”
“They insulted me,” said El-Khatib. “They saw me, I had brown skin, and so…,” he said, adding that he wants ab apology from the Immigration Department.
“When I called Adel Beyhum from a pay phone, maybe the plain-clothes officer was listening to me talking in Arabic, and he followed me,” said Khaled. “So, maybe we should not talk Arabic in Cyprus — it is not allowed.”
“I’m very sorry about this,” Aristidou said. “I will explain to him, perhaps personally, and I will send the officer in charge to see him. I will have the officer who was in charge that night speak with him and tell him we are sorry.”
