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Mohamed Bary, the father of the Ohio teenager who ran away from home saying her parents would kill her for converting to Christianity, says he wants nothing more than to reunite his family.
But he and his daughter seem further apart than ever.
Tuesday night, he said Rifqa, 17, is lying when she says that he spent hours every weekend at a mosque that harbors Islamic terrorists and that he had menaced his daughter with her laptop, saying: "If you have this Jesus in your heart, you are dead to me. I will kill you!"
"It's totally a lie," he said by phone from his home near Columbus. "We're not like that."
A nearly monthlong investigation by Franklin County Children Services in Ohio backs him up. Investigators there determined the allegations of abuse were unsubstantiated.
"I only wish," he said, "that they'll be able to send my daughter back home."
Today in Orlando a judge will hear arguments from attorneys on both sides about whether Rifqa should be returned home to Ohio.
Rifqa Bary disappeared July 19. She fled by bus to Florida because she had learned about Orlando evangelical pastors Blake and Beverly Lorenz and their Global Revolution Church on a Christian prayer group on Facebook.
The girl arrived at the Lorenzes' house on July 22. Authorities didn't know where she was until Aug. 6. The Orlando Police Department picked her up Aug. 7. She's been living with a Christian foster family since Aug. 10.
A judge in Orlando decided on Aug. 21 that she should be kept in Florida until the custody issues get settled. He also ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to look into allegations of mental and physical abuse made against the Bary parents and to determine the threat level for her at home.
The FDLE had investigators in Ohio last week. So did the state Department of Children and Families. The agencies' aim is to be done with their investigations in time for the hearing today.
This week, John Stemberger, the Christian social conservative who is representing Rifqa pro bono, filed a 33-page memo that portrayed the Noor Islamic Cultural Center as a terrorist stronghold. If Rifqa is not killed by her family, Stemberger has suggested, she will be killed by a member of Central Ohio's "radical" Muslim community.
"It's only a matter of time," he said Monday in a conference call with reporters, "before she slips away into the night."
FBI spokesman Michael Brooks, who works out of the bureau's Cincinnati office, which covers Columbus, said this week that he couldn't comment on whether there are any current investigations into the Noor mosque. But he did say this: Since Sept. 11, there have been three prosecutions of terrorists with ties to Columbus — two of them in Columbus, the third in Virginia with a link back to Columbus — and none of those three trials, he said, included testimony about the Noor mosque.
In her affidavit, Rifqa was specific in her mentions of the Noor mosque: Her father drove 25 minutes to get there, even though there were eight mosques closer to their apartment; he made her go to youth meetings that lasted five hours; they went every Friday to gatherings that lasted three hours; her family hosted mosque-related meetings; her father was "very intent" on raising her in something she termed "original Islam."
Mohamed Bary said this week he sometimes goes to the Noor mosque with his family, but he also sometimes goes to a different mosque, on Broad Street in Columbus, and he goes to any mosque sparingly, he said, because more weekends than not he's on the road for work as a jeweler at gem shows.
"Once every two months," he said, he goes with his family to a mosque. When they do go, they don't go for hours, "30 minutes max on Friday," he said. And when he's not there, he explained, his family typically doesn't go either, because his wife doesn't drive. The director of the Noor mosque told the Associated Press that he doesn't know the Bary family personally.
Mohamed Bary said he has known for at least a year that his daughter was interested in Christianity. He said he had no problem with that, but at times suggested that she also study Islam.
They moved to this country from Sri Lanka almost 10 years ago. At New Albany High School, his daughter made nothing but A's and B's, and was a cheerleader, dressed perkily in a maroon uniform — a westernized teenage girl, he said, living in modern middle America.
In the couple of months before she ran away, he said, her behavior started to change: She stayed up late on the computer on Facebook, slept into the afternoons, read her Bible alone on the balcony outside, and would be sullen on rides in the car.
He wasn't so much concerned that she was going to Christian sites on the computer, he said, as he was worried that the people she seemed to be talking to on Facebook were older and male. Sometimes she got picked up by people he and his wife had never met, he said, and the people didn't come to the door, which made them uncomfortable.
"I never expected it to go this far," Mohamed Bary said this week. "I want my daughter to come home. I don't care what she practices. It's okay. But I want us all to be together."
Times news researcher Shirl Kennedy contributed to this report. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8751.
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