Momodou Taal, who fled the country in March 2025 after his visa was revoked for participating in pro-Palestinian protests, said in an email statement to The Sun that he was detained by British police at Heathrow Airport for six hours on Friday.
Taal said that he was questioned immediately after landing in the United Kingdom, and that questions focused on his personal history during the six hour long detainment, according to a post on X from Taal. He also wrote that police confiscated his phone and laptop, and took his DNA.
Under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, British police can question anyone who they believe is involved in the “current, emerging and future terrorist activity,” at ports of entry, according to the Counterterrorism Policing website.
Taal was suspended by the University in September 2024 for helping to organize the pro-Palestinian encampment, and was later told to surrender himself to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. However, Taal has never been formally charged with any crime.
He voluntarily left the country amid a lawsuit against the Trump administration, writing in a March email statement to The Sun that he had “lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs.”
During his detainment, authorities asked about “his childhood, mosque, Islamic preachers, and friends,” and if he had ever “read Karl Marx,” Taal wrote in a statement sent on Friday.
The detainment comes amid reports that a group of United Nations Special Rapporteurs sent a letter to Cornell and four other universities expressing concern over human rights violations in October.
Specifically, the letter singles out Taal and Amandla Thomas-Johnson, another Cornell graduate student who left the country after his visa was revoked, as examples of “individuals who have faced violations of their rights to liberty, due process, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, religion, and access to justice,” that the University would need to detail how it would protect.
The detainment “stinks of British complicity in American intelligence operations and human rights abuses, and not for the first time,” Taal wrote in the statement. “It’s clear that powerful institutions who support genocide on both sides of the Atlantic don’t want their dirty linen aired in public…Did the Americans ask authorities in the UK—the submissive partner in the special relationship—to detain me?”
At the time of publication, Taal remains without his laptop or phone.
Atticus Johnson is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at ajohnson@cornellsun.com.
