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Volume No. 1 Issue No. 28 - Friday, September 13 30, 2002 |
Ross University Students Detained in Terrorism Investigation
by Thomson Fontaine
 Three men detained by police in Florida for questioning are said by government officials to have been students at Ross Medical University in Portsmouth, Dominica.
The cars in which they were driving were stopped by Florida police after a woman at
a Shoney's restaurant in Calhoun, Georgia reported overhearing the three who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent making ``alarming'' comments,
according to Mickey Lloyd of the Georgia Department of Public Safety.
Calhoun is approximately 680 miles from Florida, and Eunice Stone, who said
she was the one who called authorities, told Fox News Channel that one of the men said: "Well, if they're mourning at 9/11, what are they going to do about 9/13?".
She said the men talked about going to Miami and "bringing it down," though she wasn't sure what "it" meant." . The woman alerted local police on Thursday evening and law enforcement agencies across
the US were on the look out for the three. "What she reported would lead a reasonable person to believe a criminal act was pending,"
said Vernon Keenan, acting director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
In light of recent terrorist threats, police were taking no chances and shut down a significant portion of highway I-75 for several hours as bomb sniffing dogs and explosive experts were rushed to the scene. The three were taken into custody and questioned by the FBI. Police later said that a search of the car turned out no explosives.
There is speculation that the three may have been joking all along and that they were in fact on their way to a medical conference in Miami. Early reports indicated that at
least two of the men were naturalized Americans, and the three were from Jordan, Iran and Pakistan respectively.
Late this evening the three were released after police indicated
that they could not determine a terrorist link and that it was plausible that the three medical students from Dominica were really attending a medical conference in Miami.
Ross Medical University was established
in Dominica in the early eighties, and has over the years, trained hundreds of US medical students currently practicing medicine in the US and elsewhere.

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