JENDOUBA, Tunisia — Two Americans were detained in this small town in northwestern Tunisia, suspected of involvement with a terrorist organization, police officials said on Wednesday.
The men were arrested on Tuesday and then transferred to the country’s main counterterrorism center in Tunis, the capital, the police said. They were released and driven away in a United States Embassy car on Wednesday, police officials said.
The United States Embassy in Tunis said it could not comment on the case and referred questions to the State Department in Washington. A State Department spokesman, John Kirby, said in an email statement that the agency was aware of reports that American citizens had been arrested on suspicion of terrorist activities, but he declined any additional comment. The men are brothers, Nathan Wells Lawwliss, 32, and Patrick Alan Lawwliss, 31, according to both the police and a man who rented them an apartment.
The police in this small, hardscrabble town have been dealing with terrorist suspects for several years. Islamist fighters operate in the low scrubby mountains that rise behind the town and occasionally they ambush police officers or lure youths to join them. But the police were scratching their heads over the latest arrivals: two Americans from Michigan with long beards and unkempt hair, who rented an apartment and said they were enrolling in the local university. The men did not fit the stereotypes that most Tunisians have of Americans. “Usually Americans are clean and physical,” said Lotfi Ouerghli, 52, a cafe owner who rented the men an apartment. “They seemed like they had not been living in the city. They looked like they had been living in the wild.”
The men gave him a month’s rent, he said, but he was uncomfortable about his lodgers. The younger one seemed anxious and unhappy, he said. The older brother was religious; he was teaching his brother the Quran in Arabic, Mr. Ouerghli said.
For the Tunisian police, the arrival of Americans in town was an alarm. Tunisia was targeted in a bombing by Al Qaeda in 2002 and has been grappling with a new wave of terrorist attacks since 2013. Dozens of foreign tourists were killed in attacks in 2015 by gunmen at the national museum in Tunis and on a beach resort hotel.
“For Americans we were a bit worried,” said Abdelfatteh Ayadi, the police commissioner of the university district where the two men found lodging. “Americans are a target and in my position I have to guard them. That’s my job.”
“I went to talk to them, but it was a bit strange,” he said. “They wore big boots full of mud and they spoke only English, but they could understand Arabic.” The men were renting a cheap apartment in a working-class area near the university, not a place where foreigners usually stay, he said.
The police commissioner asked them to come to the police station. The older brother was carrying the identity card of his wife, who is Tunisian. When the police called her, she told them the couple had recently divorced. “When I saw things were incomprehensible, I passed it on to my superiors,” Commissioner Ayadi said.
The men, who had arrived in town on Sunday, were interviewed at the police station on Monday, when the police also obtained a warrant to search their apartment. By Tuesday morning they were under arrest and taken to Tunis. The elder brother possessed photos of Osama bin Laden, as well as numerous photos of women in full Islamic niqab, police officials said. He also displayed the black flag of the Islamic State on his Facebook page. He also had been messaging with someone in Syria on Facebook and expressed his desire to be in the front line of jihad to protect his younger brother, according to a police investigator. The message was dated Oct. 19, he said.
The police are uncertain what the two men intended to do in Jendouba. They did not have the right qualifications to enroll in the university, so they could not have studied in Jendouba, the police said. They may have hoped to link up with insurgents in the mountains, but they had little chance of slipping under the radar of the authorities in a small town like Jendouba, the police said. If they wanted simply to study the Quran, they should have gone to Tunis, the police said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/world/africa/tunisia-americans-detained.html?ref=africa