“Everything is fine,” said Mohamed Meshal, the father of Amir Mohamed Meshal.
When Mr. Meshal, of Tinton Falls, N.J., left for Somalia in December 2006, the African nation was on the edge of chaos.
Ethiopian troops, with backing from the United States, were preparing to invade Somalia to restore to power a transitional Somali government that had been forced from the capital, Mogadishu, by militants who wanted to establish a strictly Islamic state. The invasion threat prompted the insurgent Islamists to call on Muslims around the world to help defend Somalia by fighting a jihad against Ethiopia.
During his four-month odyssey, Mr. Meshal was imprisoned in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia.
“It’s been quite an ordeal,” Jonathan Hafetz, Mr. Meshal’s attorney, said yesterday.
Mr. Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said he did not know why Mr. Meshal had been released.
“The Meshal family is thrilled that their son Amir is free after four months of detention without due process,” the family said in a statement. “They look forward to spending time with their son, who they love very much.”
A spokesman for the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry declined to comment last night about Mr. Meshal’s release or to provide other details. Calls to the F.B.I. were not immediately returned.
United States officials have said in the past that Mr. Meshal is not wanted by American authorities.
In January, a few weeks after Mr. Meshal arrived in Somalia, fighting broke out and he fled south, along with a cadre of Islamist leaders and fighters. In late January, he reached neighboring Kenya.
While trying to enter Kenya illegally, he was detained by Kenyan authorities and put in jail. He was interrogated by F.B.I. agents, who concluded that he had no ties to terrorist organizations, American officials said.
Mr. Meshal told the F.B.I. that he had been in Somalia to help rebuild that country as an Islamic state, an American official said.
During his detention in Kenya, the State Department and the F.B.l. told Mr. Meshal’s family that once they sent an airline ticket, he would be released from prison.
Instead, in February, Mr. Meshal was blindfolded, shackled and put on a plane to Somalia. By then much of the country was controlled by Ethiopian soldiers. He was placed in a Somali jail.
The United States said then that it had no role in deporting Mr. Meshal to Somalia and that Kenya had done so without notifying the American Embassy.
However, the Kenyan government defended the deportation and dozens of others because it said the detainees had been engaged in a guerrilla war against a democratically elected government, referring to Somalia.
In late February, Mr. Meshal was taken from Somalia to Ethiopia, where he remained imprisoned until yesterday.
Mr. Hafetz said yesterday that after Mr. Meshal was released Friday, he was flown first to Germany and then arrived in the United States yesterday afternoon.