Middle Eastern “Students” Vanish In NY

Although several of the September 11 hijackers were in the country with student visas, federal authorities are severely downplaying the seriousness of their failure to locate 11 Egyptian men who have disappeared after arriving in the U.S. last month with student visas.

The men, ages 18-22, have not been seen since landing at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport late last month with valid student visas to attend an English program at Montana State University in Bozeman. They missed their connecting flight to Montana and are somewhere in the country, perhaps still in the Big Apple.

The FBI decided to finally start looking for the men this week because university officials contacted the Department of Homeland Security to report that only two of the 13 exchange students from Egypt’s Mansoura University had reported for class.

A top FBI official in Montana seems sure that there is no nexus to terrorism and actually said that “there are lots of people who show up in the country every day who do not do what they said they would do.”

A perfect example is the four September 11 hijackers who entered and remained in the country with student visas. Surely, they didn’t inform federal officials that they would participate in an atrocious terrorist attack yet they did.

Perhaps its time for U.S. authorities to reconsider the foreign student exchange system. Jihad Watch asks how many such incidents must occur before authorities begin to reconsider the wisdom of such programs in the first place.