NEW YORK — The Associated Press has learned that the New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond city limits, including Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo. The department even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.
Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students hadn't been accused of wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Asked about the monitoring, police spokesman Paul Browne provided a list of 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations.
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