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UK terror suspect in Mexico is simply a tourist
MEXICO CITY, June 22 (Reuters) - A man arrested in Mexico and named as a key terrorism suspect with possible links to the Sept. 11 attackers, is in fact a tourist who poses no security risk, red-faced Mexican authorities said on Wednesday.
Oops!
The attorney general's office set bells ringing on Tuesday when it announced it had detained Lebanese-born British citizen Amer Haykel at a fire station in the state of Baja California Sur in cooperation with U.S. authorities. It said Haykel was wanted in the United States and was "linked to extremist groups presumably involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."
But Mexican law enforcement backed down on Wednesday, saying U.S. authorities had recently cleared Haykel from suspicion but forgotten to take his name off a terrorism suspect blacklist. "They forgot to deactivate the red alert," said a spokesman for the attorney general's office.
Oops! We bad.

He said Haykel had raised suspicions when he crossed the border into the United States in May, but U.S. authorities soon found he had no apparent links to any terrorist group. Mexican immigration authorities, who had been questioning Haykel since his arrest, said they were authorizing his release.
Haykel, who speaks four languages, had been in Mexico for a month as a tourist, and is now free to stay in the country for several weeks more on a tourist visa, the national migration institute said. "It has now been confirmed that he poses no threat to national security. The information we have does not place him as a risky person," the institute's chief spokesman, Hermenegildo Castro, said.
Haykel's case is the latest false alarm of supposed terrorism suspects in Mexico or Central America, seen as a weak spot in the U.S. fight against terrorism. A security alert sparked in Nicaragua in May over the suspected presence of two al Qaeda operatives in Central America turned out to be a mistake. Often criticized by Washington for failing to halt border violence, Mexico announced triumphantly earlier on Wednesday that its arrest of Haykel in cooperation with U.S. authorities showed it was up to the task of securing the frontier.

A few more details: Before his arrest, Haykel spent several days in the tourist resort of Cabo San Lucas, sleeping in a local fire station, according to those who met him. He told acquaintances he was a pilot who was wandering the world on a tight budget.
A wandering pilot born in Lebanon, no wonder he was on the watch list
Haykel was arrested at the volunteer fire station of Todos Santos, a small town on the Pacific coast about 35 miles north-west of Cabo San Lucas that is known as a haven for US expatriates. The state office of the federal attorney general's office said Haykel had spent time in the Cancun area on the Caribbean coast before going to north-western Mexico, initially to the state of Sonora and then across the Gulf of California to Baja California Sur.
I believe the correct term is "beach bum"

Posted by: Steve 2005-06-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=122359