Posted on 09/25/2002 1:44:55 AM PDT by sarcasm
n Egyptian immigrant who went on a July 4 shooting spree at Los Angeles International Airport told immigration officials nearly a decade ago that the Egyptian authorities had accused him of being affiliated with a known terrorist organization, officials disclosed yesterday.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service failed to investigate evidence that appeared to link the immigrant, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, to an Egyptian extremist group even as the agency was considering his application for political asylum in the mid-1990's, the officials said. A rigorous examination of the asylum application could have ended with Mr. Hadayet being deported, they said.
The immigration service's handling of Mr. Hadayet's case prompted Attorney General John Ashcroft to order the agency last week to conduct an investigation into possible links between asylum seekers and terrorist groups, sayofficials who are involved.
Mr. Ashcroft directed the agency to review all existing asylum cases to determine whether possible terrorist links had gone unexamined, as in the case of Mr. Hadayet. And he demanded that the agency find out whether any disciplinary action was taken against those involved in handling his case — and if not, why not, officials said. Mr. Ashcroft was "furious" about this, one official said.
Mr. Hadayet, the owner of a limousine service in Orange County, Calif., fatally shot two people and injured several more on July 4 at the ticketing area for Israel's El Al airline before a security guard killed him. Investigators say Mr. Hadayet harbored strong anti-Israeli sentiments.
The episode, coming after the F.B.I. had warned about the prospect of terrorist violence on Independence Day, renewed public fears and diplomatic tensions with Israel, which pushed the United States to investigate the shootings as a terrorist assault. F.B.I. investigators have pursued the theory that Mr. Hadayet was not acting in concert with any outside terrorist groups. The bureau's investigation is continuing.
Officials of the immigration service said they had no immediate comment on the issue. The agency is still reeling from a year of intense criticism over the ability of the Sept. 11 hijackers to maneuver within the nation. At least partly in response to the problems, some functions of the agency would be moved to the proposed Homeland Security Department if it is approved by Congress.
The immigration service turned over documents on the case yesterday to the House Judiciary Committee after weeks of discussions over what could be made available, with the I.N.S. and the Justice Department initially citing concerns about the privacy of Mr. Hadayet.
Officials with the House Judiciary Committee declined to comment on the documents, saying staff members had not yet had time to review them.
Mr. Hadayet first applied for political asylum in 1992, saying he had been persecuted for his strong religious beliefs in his native Egypt.
Officials who have seen his immigration file say Mr. Hadayet acknowledged to the I.N.S. the next year as part of the application process that he had been accused by the Egyptians of being a member of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Group. The group, classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization, has claimed responsibility for acts of violence in Egypt and has demanded freedom for participants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Mr. Hadayet admitted to the I.N.S. that he had signed a statement for the Egyptian police admitting his involvement with al-Gamaa al-Islamiya before coming to the United States, officials said. But he told the I.N.S. that he had no affiliation and that he signed the "false confession" only under duress, according to one administration official. The official said that Mr. Hadayet maintained that his only true involvement was with a nonviolent mosque.
Despite the conflicting accounts, the immigration service "made no attempt" to determine whether Mr. Hadayet had any actual terrorist links, even as his asylum application remained pending for two and a half years, the official said.
Mr. Hadayet was denied asylum in late 1995, but his immigration file was filled with other "irregularities" even after that, officials said.
The immigration service prepared a charging document against Mr. Hadayet in October 1995 accusing him of overstaying his original visa, but the case was closed after he failed to show up for a hearing and the immigration service apparently could not find him.
Though he had overstayed his visa, Mr. Hadayet was allowed to obtain a temporary work authorization in 1996, and he and his family earned permanent residency status the next year, after his wife won a federal visa lottery. Administration officials said it was not clear whether immigration officials reviewing his residency status knew of the earlier allegations about the terror group.
Administration officials also said they were puzzled by the I.N.S.'s handling of the case and were seeking to find out why Mr. Hadayet had been allowed to stay in the country. In hindsight, they said, Mr. Hadayet's suspected links to the Islamic Group, his overstaying of his visa or his failure to show up for an immigration hearing should have been enough to initiate proceedings that would probably have led to his deportation.
The immigration service has faced intense scrutiny since the Sept. 11 attacks over its lax scrutiny of student and tourist visas, culminating in the disclosure in March that the agency sent student visa approval notices for two hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, to a Florida flight school six months after their suicide flights. But Mr. Ashcroft now has ordered officials to expand that scrutiny to include possible links between terrorist groups and asylum seekers. He directed the I.N.S. to conduct a "prompt" review into "existing" asylum cases, officials said. They said they could not provide details about the scope and meaning of that directive.
Experts in immigration law said that for an agency already overloaded by bureaucratic problems, Mr. Ashcroft's request could prove difficult if not impossible to carry out. The immigration service receives tens of thousands of asylum applications each year, including more than 64,000 last fiscal year. Beyond that, applicants routinely claim that they were involved in activities that their governments considered extreme or subversive.
"Where do you draw the line," said Daniel M. Kowalski, an asylum law expert who edits an immigration bulletin in Texas, "between someone who's considered a `freedom fighter' and someone who slides into the area of terrorism or persecutor? All of these labels are 100 percent politically driven."
I don't expect any serious reform to come from this. There was no way an INS person overlooked this by mistake. I suspect our traitorous State Department must be actually overruling INS somehow.
I'm not sure how much INS people would have known about al-Gamaa al-Islamiya in 1992-5.
After this revelation, I wonder if the government will continue to claim that the July 4th incident at LAX was not terrorism.
Los Angeles airport shooting kills 3
Though there is no clear-cut evidence that this gunman is related to a terror organization, it's the most logical assumption that when someone opens fire on an El Al counter in an international airport, most likely this is a terror attack," said Ephraim Sneh, Israeli transportation minister.
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