A professor at Northwest Iowa Community College in Sheldon is on paid administrative leave after he says the school accused him and his students of supporting al Qaeda by selling pirated music and videos. 

The school has confirmed the FBI is investigating activity on the college's computers. 

The Northwest Iowa Community College is the center of a federal investigation. And Steven Gifford says he's the target. 

"I went to school Friday and my keys didn't work," Northwest Iowa Community College Professor Steven Gifford said.

For the past week Steven Gifford has been sitting at home. He's been with the school as a computer programming professor for nine years and says the school's administration first put him on leave because of budget issues. 

"The vice president in the past said she wasn't happy about the software I bought. She didn't think it had educational value," Gifford said.

But while Gifford was sitting at home, the FBI showed up and said there may be more to the investigation at the school. 

"They told us the college had alleged that my students and I were running a piracy ring. We were downloading, cracking and re-selling software, movies and music and were doing this in support of al Qaeda terrorists," Gifford said.

"Today I find out that we're being proclaimed as terrorists. I'm a soldier in the U.S. Army, I volunteered for my second deployment, this pisses me off," Gifford's student Richard Sittig said.

Northwest Iowa Community College said in a release that they do have one employee on administrative leave but at this time it is not related to the federal investigation, but Gifford says otherwise.

"The timing of all of these things seems very unusal to me," Gifford said.

That's because Gifford says he's about to become the president of the school's faculty association and the administration doesn't like him. 

"I've been an irritant in their side for quite a while," Gifford said.

But Gifford says to claim he and his students ran a video and music piracy ring to support terrorists is completely false. 

In the school's written statement, it says they called police when officials noticed high bandwith usage on school computers which could be related to downloading copyrighted or licensed material.