SAN FRANCISCO, July 5: In the last year, the US Homeland Security officials have begun to use an immigration law granting foreign religious workers temporary visas into the US as a way to prosecute, jail and deport Muslim clerics they say have links to terrorism, the Los Angeles Times has reported.

In one of several recent cases, Shabbir Ahmed — the 42-year-old Pakistani imam of a Lodi, California, mosque charged with overstaying his three-year religious-worker visa — faces an immigration court hearing.

The hearing is part of what investigators say a several-year probe of terrorism links in the Lodi’s large Pakistani American community. Mr Ahmed has not been charged with any terrorist crime.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that Shabbir Ahmed’s anti-US invectives were widely known before he was granted entry.

In October 2001, after US military aircraft began bombing Al Qaeda bases and Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, Mr Ahmed — then a 35-year-old imam of a small mosque in Islamabad — was one of the main speakers at an anti-US demonstration at a market near the US Embassy in the Pakistani capital, the paper said.

A month later at another rally, the Boston Globe quoted Mr Ahmed as calling for a rebellion against Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf: “Whoever is against Islam, we will destroy him. If this is rebellion, we are not afraid of rebellion. Blood is going to be spilled in Pakistan,’ Mr Ahmed said.

The paper pointed out that the events were widely reported by Pakistani and foreign media. But a short time later Mr Ahmed walked into the consular section of the heavily fortified US Embassy compound, where he was granted an uncontested three-year “religious worker” visa to the United States.

The man who sponsored Mr Ahmed for the Lodi job — former imam of Lodi mosque, Mohammad Adil Khan — is also jailed without bond on immigration charges, as is Mr Khan’s 22-year-old son, Mohammad Hassan Adil. All three men came into US on R-1 or R-2 religious worker visas.

Mr Ahmed arrived in San Francisco on Jan 23, 2002, and immediately assumed the position of imam of a Lodi, California, mosque that is the centre of religious life for Lodi city’s large Pakistani American immigrant community. Since then he has made at least two trips to Pakistan.

At an immigration hearing on June 24 in San Francisco, Mr Ahmed admitted making anti-American speeches but said he had since completely changed his opinion about the United States.