An online campaign was launched on behalf of a convicted terrorist who made Lubbock his home.
Khalid Aldawsari bought chemicals and equipment with the intent to create an improvised explosive device in December 2010, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
According to an FBI press release, he was “lawfully admitted into the United States in 2008, on a student visa,” and was enrolled at South Plains College at the time of his arrest in February 2011. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2012.
A campaign, launched on Twitter, has called for the release of the man who had also attended Texas Tech.
“Some of the tweets were asking just for God’s help and the protection and the refuge of Khalid Aldawsari because he was wrongly accused,” said David Villarreal, Director of the Language Laboratory at Texas Tech.
“A lot of the tweets on this were showing support for the mother of Khalid Aldawsari saying that they stand with him and a lot of the tweets referred to his false imprisonment and that he was innocent and that he shouldn’t be in prison,” he said.
Villarreal helped translate some of the messages from Arabic.
“‘We plea to our wise government, that they open the case of our son, of our citizen son,’ and then his name ‘Khalid Aldawsari,'” he said of one tweet.
Another tweet included a video that showed a woman, believed to be Aldawsari’s mother, asking for her son to be released.
“She has a plea for them to look into the case of her son, but she at the very end says ‘I’m an old person and I want to see my son before I die,'” Villarreal explained.
The Twitter account was started in November 2013.
The posts range from supporting Aldawsari’s mother and calling for his release, to asking the Saudi Arabian government to intervene.
“One of the comments… is that they are going to undertake this campaign, take it a step further, to coincide with President Obama’s visit in Saudi Arabia,” Villarreal said of the President’s upcoming visit to the region.
Calls from EverythingLubbock.com to the FBI were not returned as of Monday night.
