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MATTHEW BARAKAT Associated Press Writer
(AP) - McLEAN, Virginia
A former university professor who pleaded guilty last year to supporting a Palestinian terror group was transferred to a medical prison Wednesday as he entered the fourth week of a hunger strike.
Sami al-Arian, 49, began the hunger strike Jan. 22 to protest efforts to force him to testify in front of a grand jury investigating a group of Muslim charities in Virginia. He said a plea bargain with U.S. prosecutors last year frees him from any obligation to cooperate with the government.
Nikki Credic, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said prison officials have been monitoring his health daily.
Prosecutors obtained a court order late last week approving the transfer, al-Arian's lawyer said, adding that the real motivation may have been to move al-Arian to a more isolated location.
Al-Arian's daughter Laila said her father fainted and hit his head Tuesday, and that he has lost 30 pounds (13.5 kilograms) since beginning the hunger strike, during which he is only drinking four glasses of water a day.
"We're definitely worried about him, but we respect why he chose to go on a hunger strike," she said. "You understand it when you sort of feel like you're cornered and you feel like the legal system is failing you."
Al-Arian was a prominent Palestinian activist who met with U.S. President George W. Bush and other political leaders in the years before he was charged.
Al-Arian has said he believes the effort to bring him in front of the grand jury is merely a trap by an overzealous U.S. prosecutor.
"I think it's just a pretext to hold me either in contempt or charge me with perjury, because whatever I'm going to say, they're going to say, 'You lied,'" al-Arian said in a jailhouse interview earlier this month with Democracy Now!, an independent media outlet.
But two U.S. judges have sided with prosecutors and said al-Arian must testify.
Because a judge has found al-Arian in contempt, every day he serves on the contempt charge extends his release date on a 57-month prison term handed down as part the plea for providing support to members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Prosecutors had sought to prove al-Arian was a leader of PIJ, a terrorist group that has carried out suicide bombings against Israel. The trial ended with acquittal on some charges and a hung jury on the rest.
Al-Arian's lawyer, Peter Erlinder, said his client's fear of a perjury trap is valid given the aggressive tactics employed by federal prosecutors in Alexandria, who have handled numerous high-profile terrorism cases in recent years.
Just two weeks ago, prosecutors won a perjury conviction against Sabri Benkahla, 31.
Benkahla had been one of just two defendants to win acquittal among more than a dozen who faced terror-related charges at the Alexandria courthouse since Sept. 11, 2001. Shortly after his acquittal in 2004, prosecutors said he lied in grand jury testimony about his training with a Pakistani militant group and charged him with perjury. He now faces up to 25 years in prison.
The civil contempt sentence al-Arian is now serving could run through June, or until the judge decides that further incarceration is unlikely to coerce al-Arian's testimony. But even then, prosecutors can seek another six-month term if they extend the grand jury and subpoena al-Arian again.
"It just feels like an endless nightmare," Laila al-Arian said. "It feels like purgatory."
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