NEW YORK - Five US Muslims filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday alleging violation of their rights by US border agents who detained them as they returned from an Islamic conference in Canada.
The three men and two women say they were held, along with dozens of other US Muslims, for more than six hours and interrogated, photographed and fingerprinted against their will in December last year.
The lawsuit alleges that the plaintiffs were singled out after telling customs officials they had attended a "Reviving the Islamic Spirit" conference in Toronto.
All were later released without charge.
Defendants named in the lawsuit filed in New York federal court included US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
The annual conference draws thousands of Muslims from Canada, the United States and overseas.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union which is helping represent the plaintiffs, condemned what she described as the "over-zealous and counter-productive ethnic and religious profiling" encouraged by government security policies in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"None of the citizens who were detained had done anything unlawful, nor were they charged with any unlawful act," Lieberman told reporters.
"You don't lose your rights when you're a Muslim. You don't lose your rights when you cross a border, and you certainly don't lose your rights by attending a religious conference," she added.
One of the plaintiffs, Sawsaan Tabbaa, an orthodontist from Buffalo in New York, said the experience at the border crossing "was the most humiliating I have ever gone through."
Tabbaa said she had refused to be digitally fingerprinted on the grounds that she had done nothing wrong, but was physically forced into compliance.
"I started sobbing like a kid," she said.
At the time of the incident, numerous press reports quoted Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Kristie Clemens as saying the government had "credible information" that Islamic conferences were being used to promote and fund terrorist activities.
Clemens was not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.
Tabbaa's son, Hassan Shibley, 18, said border guards had initially insisted they were picked at random, but when he entered the processing room he saw that all the occupants were Muslim.
"It was like I was walking into my local mosque," Shibley said.
The lawsuit seeks to have the government's actions declared unlawful and an injunction against further enforcement of such "policies and practices."
04/20/2005 18:05 GMT