Posted on 09/25/2002 7:02:17 PM PDT by USA21
INS: System Allowed Shooter in U.S.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Egyptian immigrant who shot and killed two people July 4 at Los Angeles International Airport previously told U.S. authorities he had been falsely accused of being in a militant Egyptian group that the United States now lists as a terror group, officials said Wednesday.
An Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman says a broken asylum system allowed him to remain in the country.
In a March 30, 1993, interview for asylum, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet told the INS that Egyptian authorities arrested him and accused him of involvement with Al-Gamma'a al-Islamiyaa, the Islamic Group, said immigration officials who reviewed notes from the interview.
At the time, the group was waging a violent campaign to topple the secular Egyptian government and replace it with Islamic rule. The group is now on the State Department's terrorist organizations list, which did not exist until 1997.
On Wednesday, Hadayet's wife, Hala El-Awadly, and Egyptian police denied that Hadayet had any links with terrorist organizations.
The INS eventually denied Hayadet asylum, deciding his claims lacked credibility, but he did not show up for a 1995 removal hearing. He was able to remain in the United States with a work permit and become a U.S. resident after his wife won her residency in the U.S. visa lottery program.
Hadayet was killed by a security guard in the Los Angeles airport after he killed two people at Israel's El Al ticket counter.
INS spokesman Bill Strassberger said that when Hadayet applied for asylum, the INS's asylum system was in disarray, allowing applicants to stay in this country on work permits while their cases took years to resolve.
``By 1992, the asylum process was in virtual meltdown, paralysis,'' he said.
News of Hadayet's comments prompted Attorney General John Ashcroft to write to INS Commissioner James Ziglar, directing the agency to conduct ``a prompt review of existing asylum files to ascertain whether other individuals may be present in the United States who have admitted that they have been accused of terrorist activity.''
Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a Wednesday afternoon news conference that Hayadet's case ``perplexed me greatly and disturbed me profoundly.'' Ashcroft asked for the case reviews to discover ``whether there are procedures or practices which expose Americans to a kind of vulnerability, to jeopardize the safety of Americans that's part of the system.''
Ashcroft said he also wants to know if past practices allowed in people who might now cause harm to Americans. He did not address reforms made since the Hayadet case.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act, passed by Congress in 1996, called for the State Department to start keeping a list of terrorist organizations. A State Department spokesman could not be immediately reached.
The group Hadayet mentioned first shows up on the list on Oct. 8, 1999, under a similar name, an immigration official said.
``That long ago, most immigration officials would not know what the guy was talking about. The U.S. understanding of terrorism groups, especially in the Muslim world, there was a lot more distance at that time,'' said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorist chief.
Hayadet entered the country as a tourist July 31, 1992, and applied for asylum Dec. 29, 1992. He was allowed to stay legally through Jan. 25, 1993.
On his application, he said he was arrested several times for no reason and forced to sign papers saying he committed crimes he did not commit, INS officials said.
The asylum system has since been reformed. Now INS officers must decide a case in 60 days and an immigration judge must decide whether to order the immigrant's deportation or reverse the asylum decision. Immigrants seeking asylum now cannot apply for work permits when their cases are pending, even if they are appealing their case, Strassberger said.
About 97 percent of asylum applicants now show up for asylum hearings. The INS no longer mails applicants the decision. Instead, the applicant is told at a scheduled interview. An immigrant who misses the interview faces automatic removal.
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On the Net:
Immigration and Naturalization Service:
http://www.ins.gov
State Department terrorism list:
http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2001/html/10252.htm ig
New York Post Wednesday September 25, 2002
WASHINGTON - A Minnesota FBI agent investigating Zacarias Moussaoui testified yesterday that he notified the Secret Service weeks before Sept. 11 that a terror team might hijack a plane and "hit the nation's capital."
The FBI agent said that evidence in the case pointed to a broader hijack attack, but added that investigators were largely in the dark because they were blocked from getting access to Moussaoui's computer and handwritten notes.
"We needed to get into those individual handwritten notes to determine if there were other conspirators identified, if there were battle plans that existed that we didn't know," the agent said yesterday at a pre-9/11 intelligence hearing in Congress.
The FBI and INS arrested Moussaoui on Aug. 15, 2001, and jailed him for overstaying his visa.
The Minnesota agents said they continued to investigate Moussaoui while he was in jail, although they were rebuffed by FBI lawyers when they asked to search his computer and notes.
The French-Moroccan Moussaoui first raised suspicions at a Minnesota flight school by trying to fly sophisticated Boeing 747s before getting rudimentary pilot training.
"We were sensitive to the fact that this could have been a much larger conspiracy - and we were not satisfied that having Mr. Moussaoui in custody dampened the possibility of a terrorist attack," the Minnesota agent said.
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