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Palestinian Abdullah Jinzawi, 20, befriended 16-year-old Michigan girl Katherine Lester through the Myspace.com Web site and invited her to join him in the West Bank town of Jericho. (AP)
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| By Associated Press June 20, 2006 |
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The Palestinian man whose Web romance with a 16-year-old Michigan girl touched a global media maelstrom is a reclusive, music-loving computer buff who said he genuinely loves the young woman who fled her mother's home to be with him, but didn't quite make it.
In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Abdullah Jimzawi, a 20-year-old high school dropout who lives with his parents in the sleepy West Bank town of Jericho, said he's heartbroken U.S. authorities sent Katherine Lester home before she could reach him.
Jimzawi, a short, quiet young man with close-cropped hair, a two-day beard and large, dark eyes, said that he and Lester planned to marry, that she was willing to convert to Islam and that the pair are still in close contact, speaking to each other at least five hours a day via Internet phone calls.
"We love the same things, the same songs and we have similar dreams. I fell in love with her because she is innocent and good hearted. We found ourselves to be soul mates," he told the AP on Sunday at his family's comfortable house in Jericho, a town of 17,000 that is largely immune from the violence and mayhem plaguing the rest of the West Bank.
Jimzawi and Lester met through MySpace.com, a social networking Web site whose enormous popularity with teenagers has raised concerns among U.S. authorities, with scattered accounts of sexual predators targeting minors they met on the site.
In Jericho, Jimzawi didn't come across as a dangerous Internet predator, however. He works in his father's business delivering goods to minimarkets, has never gotten into trouble and, while a person of few friends, doesn't appear to have enemies either.
Jimzawi said his love for Lester is pure. Had she made it to Jericho, he said, she would have slept in his sister's bedroom, not his. He said he would have walked with her through the tree-lined streets of Jericho, and that his family would have celebrated her 17th birthday together on June 21.
"When I realized she wasn't coming, I felt my whole world collapse," he said. "My tears didn't stop and I couldn't sleep for three days."
Earlier this month, Lester boarded a flight to Israel after slipping out of her mother's house in Gilford, Michigan. At a stopover in Amman, Jordan, U.S. authorities, alerted by her parents, seized her passport and sent her back home. Lester has not spoken to reporters since returning to the U.S. and has taken refuge in an undisclosed location with her father to escape the media frenzy.
Katherine's older sister, Mary, said Monday that she believes Jimzawi's statements that he loved Katherine and wanted to marry her, but she can't understand why he arranged for Katherine to travel there.
"If you love this girl like you say you do, then why don't you come up here?" Mary Lester asked.
Katherine, Mary Lester said, denied that she would convert to Islam and said that was a lie made up by the media.
"I don't think she realizes how serious this is," Mary Lester said of her sister. "We've all tried talking to her, but talking to a 16-year-old is like trying to bend steel," she said.
Jimzawi said he was reluctant to talk to the press because of what he said was unfair media treatment following Lester's ill-fated trip. But after some convincing, he agreed to talk and be photographed in shorts and sandals, showing visitors the ADSL-connected computer on which he said he met Lester eight months ago.
Chickens roamed the front yard outside the middle-class home, which has a small swimming pool with no water, a large porch with a table, and prolific date palms rising from the dirt.
In a sitting room with pink curtains, Jimzawi clicked his computer mouse to play a song from Staind, one of his favorite heavy metal bands. Six framed posters of Quranic verses and Islamic prayers adorned the walls, including one depicting the 99 names of God, such as "the merciful," "the compassionate," "the straightforward one."
Jimzawi, the second of five children in his family, said he explained to Lester that she should convert to Islam in order to marry him.
"She said, 'No problem because I love you and I love your religion,"' he said.
Jimzawi's remarks about religion, however, were among several statements that didn't exactly jibe with those of family and peers. Jimzawi said, "I pray five times a day" but his veiled mother, Sana, told the AP that her son is not particularly religious.
The mother said Lester was set to sign a marriage contract as soon as she got to Jericho. The son said the couple planned to wait for Lester to turn 18 before getting married.
Jimzawi said he had little interest in going to the U.S. to work or study. But 19-year-old Tarek Ali, who dropped out of high school along with Jimzawi and claimed to be a friend of his at one time, said Jimzawi "wanted to take the SAT exam and study computer engineering in the U.S. That is his dream."
Ali described Jimzawi as a "very honest and clean person."
Mahmoud Bali, the 41-year-old owner of a Jericho Internet cafe where Jimzawi worked for eight months, said the young man would spend 10 hours a day in Internet chatrooms or listening to music from the Web.
"I can describe him as a dreamer and romantic person," Bali said. "He loves songs and to chat with people outside of the country and doesn't like to talk to people here."
"Most of the young people who come to my net cafe, like Abdullah, are people obsessed with Western life and the opportunities there. They like freedom, dancing, listening to music, those things that you can't do here in Palestine, particularly in Jericho."
Jimzawi said his next step will be to apply for a visa to visit Lester in the United States.
His mother, who holds an Israeli identity card and had traveled to Tel Aviv to pick Lester up at the airport, said she was "sorry" about the pain Lester's mother must have gone through when her daughter left. "She had the right to be worried," she said.
But she said she and Abdullah had the girl's best interests at heart.
"He met a lot of girls on the Internet, but he loves her and he made everyone in the family love her," she said.
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