Palestinian Anguishes Over MySpace Romance

Palestinian Abdullah Jinzawi, 20, who befriended 16-year-old Michigan girl Katherine Lester through the Myspace.com Web site and invited her to join him in the West Bank town of Jericho sits next to his computer with the Myspace.com website open at his family's house, Sunday, June 18, 2006. Jimzawi said he is heartbroken by U.S. authorities' decision to send her back home before she could reach the West Bank. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen) (Muhammed Muheisen - AP)

JERICHO, West Bank -- The Palestinian man who had an Internet romance with a 16-year-old Michigan girl is a music-loving computer buff who says he loves the teen and is heartbroken she was sent home.

Abdullah Jimzawi, a 20-year-old high school dropout who lives with his parents in Jericho, said he and Katherine Lester had planned to marry and she intended to convert to Islam.

Lester was en route to Tel Aviv airport when she was intercepted in Amman, Jordan, by U.S. authorities who seized her passport and put her on a flight back to the United States.

The couple still speak to each other at least five hours a day via Internet phone calls, said Jimzawi, a shy soft-spoken young man with close-cropped hair and a two-day beard.

"We love the same things, the same songs and we have similar dreams. I fell in love with her because she is innocent and goodhearted. We found ourselves to be soul mates," he told The Associated Press in an interview in Jericho, a town of 17,000 that is largely immune from the violence plaguing the rest of the West Bank.

Jimzawi and Lester met through MySpace.com, a social networking Web site whose popularity with teenagers has raised concerns among U.S. authorities, with scattered accounts of sexual predators targeting minors on the site.

Jimzawi, who works in his father's business delivering goods to minimarkets, said his love for Lester is pure. Had she made it to Jericho, he said, she would have shared his sister's bedroom.

The couple would have walked together through the tree-lined streets of Jericho, he said, and he and Lester would have celebrated her 17th birthday Wednesday.

"When I realized she wasn't coming, I felt my whole world collapse," he said in the interview Sunday at his family's home. "My tears didn't stop and I couldn't sleep for three days."

Lester, who boarded a flight to Israel after slipping out of her mother's house in Gilford, Mich., has not spoken to reporters since returning to the United States on June 9. She has taken refuge at an undisclosed location with her father to escape the media frenzy.

Lester's older sister, Mary, said Monday she believes Jimzawi loves her sister and wanted to marry her. But, she said, she can't understand why he arranged for the teen to travel to the Middle East.

"If you love this girl like you say you do, then why don't you come up here?" Mary Lester asked.