04:14 PM CDT on Sunday, June 13, 2004

Associated Press

A Texas Muslim leader says he and his wife and daughter were detained for two days last weekend after officials at a Canadian airport told him he was considered a security threat.

Mohammed Zaki Alswij, an imam who moved to the United States from Iraq in 1987, said racial profiling may have been to blame for his detention in Vancouver, British Columbia. Alswij, 53, wears a cleric's robes and a turban as symbols of his religious stature and beliefs.

"This wouldn't happen to (just) anyone," Alswij said in Saturday's edition of the Houston Chronicle. "But because I am a Muslim, I was stopped."

Nancy Bray, a spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, said she could not discuss the Houston man's case because of privacy laws. But she said they would not deny a person entry based on his or her race.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, said it will ask the U.S. State Department and Canadian authorities to investigate the incident.

Alswij, a naturalized U.S. citizen, said he and his wife were traveling with their 18-year-old daughter to visit their son and grandson in Vancouver.

He said Canadian officials searched their luggage, questioned him and held them for more than 50 hours in a detention center before the family voluntarily returned to Houston on Monday. Nothing suspicious was found in the family's bags.

The interrogators questioned the Shiite scholar about his political associations and beliefs and asked him why he visited Iraq shortly after Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was toppled last year, he said.

Alswij said he went to Iraq to see his parents and the country's top Shiite leader. But he said he has no political connections.

"I'm not political in any way," he said.