A group of Muslim imams who were removed from an airline flight last month are seeking an out-of-court settlement with U.S. Airways, saying were not behaving suspiciously and should have not been taken off the airplane. Five of the six imams who were removed from the Minnesota-to-Phoenix flight have retained the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for legal representation and are seeking a mutually agreeable resolution, said Nihad Awad, CAIR executive director. U.S. Airways scheduled a meeting with the imams on December 4 to discuss the incident, but the men canceled it and hired the activist group to act as legal counsel. With the hopes of reaching an amicable resolution to this matter, we would like to take this opportunity to ask for a formal meeting with U.S. Airways executives and legal counsel, said Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR s national legal director, in a letter to the airline. The imams represented by CAIR include Omar Shahin, Didmar Faja, Ahmad Shqeirat, Marwan Sadeddin and Mohamed Ibrahim. A sixth imam, Mahmoud Sulaiman of New Mexico, is not included as a plaintiff. The six imams were removed from the November 20th flight after passengers and flight staff apparently became concerned that the men had arranged themselves in a seating formation similar to that used by the September 11, 2001 hijackers, in which members of the group occupied seats at the front, middle and back of the plane. The imams said they had deliberately taken seats apart from each other to avoid raising suspicion or concern. Flight officials and passengers were also said to have been worried by the prayer session the imams engaged in while waiting for the plane, and the requests from several of the men for seatbelt extenders, despite no apparent need for them. CAIR says the men were handcuffed for several hours and is also demanding hearings on religious and ethnic profiling at airports. An airline spokeswoman says they have received the request from CAIR for a meeting, as well as a meeting request from Representative-elect Keith Ellison, Minnesota Democrat, the first Muslim elected to Congress, but no date has been set. As far as we are concerned, we are done, and we will continue to back the crew, but we do want to reach out to the passengers, said spokeswoman Andrea Rader.
