West Bank Family Upset by MySpace No-Show

Shawn Lester, left, stands next to daughter Mary while they listen to Tuscola County Sheriff Tom Kern speak during a news conference outside the Tuscola County Court House in Caro, Mich., Monday, June 12, 2006, about the June 5 disappearance Lester's other daughter Katherine. Katherine, 16, apparently planned to visit a man in the Middle East after meeting her on MySpace.com. (AP Photo/Douglas Brooks) (J. Douglas Brooks - AP)

NABLUS, West Bank -- The mother of a West Bank man who invited a 16-year-old American to the Mideast to get married says she is distraught that the teenager has returned home and hopes to bring the couple together.

Sana Jinzawi says she was waiting at the airport in Tel Aviv to pick up Katherine Lester, who met her 20-year-old son Abdullah on the popular MySpace.com Web site.

Lester had boarded a flight to Israel last week after slipping out of her mother's house in Gilford, Mich. But U.S. authorities intercepted her at a stopover in Amman, Jordan, on Friday, seized her passport and put her on a flight home.

The wedding is off _ at least for now.

Sana Jinzawi said by telephone from her West Bank home in Jericho Wednesday that her son was heartbroken and insisted the two are in love.

"She was going to sign a marriage contract as soon as she got here," the mother said, adding she told Lester to "bring a pink dress for the engagement party and a white dress for the wedding."

"She wanted to convert to Islam and wear the head covering and live with us and adopt our culture," Sana Jinzawi said.

Renee Wood, a lawyer for Lester's mother, Shawn, said she had not heard of a marriage contract, but "we did hear that she was to marry him." Telephone messages seeking comment from Lester's parents were not immediately returned.

Jericho, a dusty backwater of 17,000 people, is a place of relative calm in the West Bank, where Israelis and Palestinians frequently clash.

Abdullah Jinzawi, who works in his father's business delivering goods to minimarkets, is no longer giving interviews. But in a phone interview with WNEM-TV in Saginaw, Mich., on Saturday, he said he met Lester on the Web seven months ago, that he was a wealthy businessman and that he wanted to marry her. He said he sent her the money for the flight.

Repeated attempts to contact Abdullah on his cellular telephone Wednesday failed. The phone was turned off, and no other telephone number was available.

Sana Jinzawi, who holds an Israeli identity card, said she traveled to Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv to greet the would-be bride last week.