Sameh Khouzam's decade in the United States has been a murder mystery of international proportions.

The Egyptian man, a Coptic Christian, fled his native country in 1998, claiming religious persecution. Today, he sits in a York County prison, awaiting a final decision June 18 on whether he will be deported.

The nine years in between included a murder charge in Egypt, where he was tried and convicted in absentia, eight years in American prisons, claims of torture at the hands of the Egyptian police and a substantial base of supporters in Lancaster County, where Khouzam now lives and works.

In plain terms, Khouzam was allowed to stay in the U.S. when a federal court ruled that sending him back to Egypt would likely result in torture, which would violate the international Convention Against Torture. Khouzam has denied Egypt's allegations that he committed a murder there..

On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts gave a one-minute speech before Congress on Khouzam's behalf, calling him an "upstanding, contributing member of the community," and asking for his release.

His friends and co-workers at Boyd/Wilson Property Management Inc. have been circulating petitions and tying up phone lines at the state and federal government level.

Khouzam's attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union say the Bush administration is circumventing the due process that Khouzam was afforded by federal courts over the past eight years.

A Web site, www.savesameh.org, pleads for public support and counts down the minutes and seconds until his court decision.

The man himself, speaking from the jail today said:

Khouzam, 38, comes from a family of wealthy camel traders and Coptic Christians, members of a sect of Orthodox Christianity said to have been founded by Saint Mark in Egypt. The Copts comprise the vast majority of the estimated 11 million Christians living in Egypt today.

This is how Khouzam relayed the story of his past to a family friend and Amnesty International volunteer, Kathleen Lucas, of York County:

The Egyptian police had been trying to forcibly convert Khouzam to Islam. Seven members of his family, including his step-father, brother and uncle, had already become Muslims.

Khouzam refused. He was picked up often by police and tortured, pressured to marry a Muslim co-worker to complete the conversion. Khouzam was already married to a Christian woman.

In 1998, he and his wife came to the United States on a tourist visa. During his stay, Khouzam got word that his mother was being held by the police and would not be released unless her son returned to Egypt and converted.

Khouzam left his wife in the United States and flew home. He promised to convert and his mother was released. A few days of subsequent quiet were followed by another police raid. This time, Khouzam was being tortured in front of the Muslim co-worker that he was supposed to marry, and her parents. The woman's mother, angry and insistent that he comply, tried to hit him with a vase. When Khouzam blocked the shot, he cut a tendon in his hand and was sent to the hospital for treatment.

In the hospital X-ray room and out of sight of his police escorts, Khouzam climbed through an open bathroom window, escaped from the hospital and ran for the airport. Some friends helped him get a ticket to the U.S. and Khouzam boarded the plane.

But mid-flight, Egyptian authorities canceled his visa and asked the U.S. to send him back upon arrival. Khouzam, they said, had murdered a woman hours before his flight.

According to federal court documents, it was confirmed by officials at John F. Kennedy International Arport in New York City that Khouzam arrived with a bandaged hand, a wound he blamed on a fight with a woman who tried to attack him with a vase shortly before he left.

That woman, Zaki Mohammed Youssef, was the one who allegedly was killed that night. Khouzam, was the one who allegedly killed her, according to Egyptian police.

For the next eight years, Khouzam sat in prisons in New York, New Jersey and York County. Despite numerous appeals, he was not granted asylum — the courts found the Egyptian claims of the murder compelling enough to assume probable cause, but did not have jurisdiction over the criminal charge.

But in 2004, Khouzam was permitted to stay in the country when both the judicial and the executive branches agreed that a return to Egypt would "more likely than not" result in torture.

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, lauded the decision, saying torture is commonly used in Egypt to elicit confessions and obtain other information, and citing Khouzam's own accounts of previous treatment at the hands of the Egyptian police.

Awaiting release at the York County facility, Khouzam met Peter Pier, a parish priest at the St. John Chrysostom Antiochian Orthodox Church in York.

Upon Khouzam's release in February 2006, Pier's church helped the Egyptian man get settled in the community. He introduced him to fellow parishioner Frank Barrett, who manages the Lancaster branch of Boyd/Wilson Property Management Company.

Khouzam's background as a CPA and his work as internal auditor at the University of Cairo caught Barrett's eye right away. But so did the glaring hole in his resume, between 1998 and the present.

"I saw that he was an honest guy, that he was a nice guy," Barrett said. "So I hired him for one week." The first seven days spilled into the next and soon, in October 2006, Khouzam was working full time as the company's controller.

Barrett remembers the way Khouzam appeared gleeful just sifting through an Excel spreadsheet again, after eight years of staring at metal bars.

He worked hard, Barrett said, and diligently reported to the prison twice a month for check-in, as a condition of his parole.

So law-abiding is his friend, Barrett said, that Khouzam wouldn't even cross an empty street until the light changed.

On May 29, Khouzam didn't show up for work. Barrett learned that his controller had been jailed and was scheduled for deportation in 72 hours.

CONTACT US: alitvak@lnpnews.com