They came for our guitar player this morning. Homeland security (I presume).

If you recall, our guitarist has an arabic-sounding name. It might as well be Kamal Abdul, but it's not. This will be my alias for him for this post, though.

Anyway, we were in St Thomas, a US port. Each time we visit this port the immigration authorities must clear the ship before anyone can go ashore – including the cones. There's also a crew check for those who have signed on since the last US port.

In addition to checking everyone's personal credentials, guys in uniforms wander here and there throughout the ship looking for suspicious packages and/or stowaways. It usually takes a couple of hours before anybody can leave the ship.

It seems that for our last visit someone had been doing some additional homework, because they came for Kamal just after we arrived in port at around 10:00 a.m. (we had been late due to a medical emergency that had required the ship to turn back to Nassau). Kamal was still in bed (as usual – no morning prayers for him) when the purser, accompanied by a uniformed immigration official and a guy in a black suit (yes!) knocked on our door.

I don't know what specifically flagged Kamal, but it may be the fact that he is working as a Canadian even though he has spent almost his entire life in Argentina, and neither English nor French is his first language. It may also have something to do with the fact that he was born in Deep River, a nuclear research facility in Ontario, and that his father is an engineer who worked there for a while.

And, of course, he has an arab-sounding name. Not many of those on our ship.

A background like that might look suspicious to a Homeland Security agent running crew checks. How were they to know he was just a guitar player?

(Oh, another thing that's been a little strange with Kamal is his ship's ID. When he first signed on, his official ID said he was a waiter. Not a musician. After he complained, they 'fixed' his card, but it then read 'Dancer', which irritated him even more, as the male dancers are all gay and he didn't want to be identified as one. Now it reads 'musician', finally.)

They wouldn't tell the musical director where Kamal was to be taken, or when he'd be back. They said they would report only to the Captain. These guys acted very serious, indeed.

Kamal was escorted off the ship under his own volition, not in cuffs or anything. And he took nothing with him, so they didn't ask him to pack anything to take along. We figured that was a good sign. And Kamal seemed to take it all in stride, surprisingly. Has he had experience???

It was a couple of hours before Kamal returned, but by that time the rumours that a terrorist was caught onboard had already begun to circulate. That's how it works in the closed environment of a ship.

The rest of the story is pretty boring – not nearly as exciting as I would have liked it to be. According to Kamal, he was taken to an office in the Governor's building in Charlotte Amalie where he was interviewed. The interview didn't take long once it got started (although he had to wait for over an hour for it to start, the interviewer being late returning from a golf game) and Kamal came out of it cleared of any suspicion. The official who interviewed him (who seemed to Kamal to be a relatively senior official) was friendly, and the questions were just ordinary questions about his personal history and background. In fact, the interviewer appeared to Kamal to be angry with those who brought him in – as if it were a waste of both their time. He apologized to Kamal for the inconvenience and got him a lift back to the ship.

So Kamal was cleared. But will the cloud of suspicion continue to hang over him? Only time will tell...