A community is desperate for answers after a veteran Cair lawyer was accused of spying for the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)
By Zainab Iqbal in New York
(MIDDLE EAST EYE) When Khalid Dada, a young undergraduate student at Ohio State University, began interning at the Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), he never expected someone he admired to be identified by the organisation as a “spy”.
Romin Iqbal, Cair-Ohio’s legal and executive director who had been leading the chapter since 2006, was someone Dada would see at the office daily. He knew him as a lawyer people trusted, who was deeply involved in the community and who helped those in trouble get out of bad situations.
When Cair revealed that Iqbal was allegedly recording and sharing information around its advocacy work with the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a group identified as part of an “Islamophobia network” in the US, the community in Columbus, Ohio, felt shocked and betrayed.
“This was the man who you went to when the FBI knocked on your door, and now this man has been accused of working for a group planning around hate for Islam,” Dada told Middle East Eye. “This is a community issue, not just a Cair-Ohio issue.”
