A former college student detained for hours at Philadelphia International Airport because he was carrying Arabic flashcards has settled his lawsuit against the US government, according to court papers the American Civil Liberties Union unveiled Friday.

The $25,000 settlement (PDF)—dated Wednesday—ends five years of litigation that commenced after Nicholas George was detained for having Arabic-English flashcards with words like "terrorist" and bomb." He was 21 at the time and on his way to California, where he was a senior at Pomona College majoring in physics and Middle Eastern studies.

"At the metal detector at airport security, Transportation Security Administration agents asked me to empty my pockets. I took the set of flashcards from my pocket and handed them to the officers. After I cleared the metal detector, they asked me to step aside for additional screening," he wrote in a blog post Friday. "One of them started rifling through the cards, and another took the book out of my carry-on. The minutes ticked by, and I got more confused about why I was being detained and more concerned that I would miss my flight. One of them called a supervisor."

Then it got even more interesting, he wrote:

After a half-hour delay at the security line, the supervisor showed up, and things turned from annoying to surreal. After looking at the book and flashcards, the supervisor asked me: "Do you know who did 9/11?" Taken totally aback, I answered: "Osama Bin Laden." Then she asked me if I knew what language Osama Bin Laden spoke. "Arabic," I replied. "So do you see why these cards are suspicious?" she finished. Imagine going from being in line at the airport to having a TSA supervisor imply you had some connection with the worst act of terrorism ever committed against your country—all over the course of a few minutes.

He said he was handcuffed and paraded through the airport until he got to a police substation. Authorities searched his luggage and kept him locked up in a cell for hours while handcuffed, before being set free, he said.

"Even after searching my luggage without probable cause of a crime and finding nothing out of the ordinary, TSA agents and the police felt they had the authority to detain and then arrest me, purely on ignorant assumptions about a language spoken by 295 million people worldwide," he wrote in his blog post.