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Terrorists may have exploited student visas

By David Washburn and David Hasemyer
The San Diego Union-Tribune
September 21, 2001

For more than six years in the 1990s, people from the Middle East came to San Diego County on bogus student visas, breaching an immigration system that has few safeguards to stop such abuse.

Through an underground network led by a Rancho Santa Fe man, nearly 100 Middle Easterners paid local community college teachers and administrators for counterfeit admission papers and grades, which allowed them to get student visas.

The terrorists responsible for the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., last week may have been able to exploit the same student visa program that the San Diego community college officials and students took advantage of.

The program, used by foreign students who want to study at U.S. universities, colleges and vocational schools, has been criticized since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Immigration authorities acknowledge that little has changed and the U.S. government is helpless when it comes to keeping track of foreign students.

"I don't know how we could monitor them considering the numbers of people who are out there," said Elaine Komis, an INS public affairs officer in Washington, D.C.

One person they lost track of was Omer Bakarbashat, the man arrested in San Diego County last weekend on suspicion that he gave financial assistance to San Diego-based terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. He was a Yemeni national living in Lemon Grove on an expired student visa.

Last year, more than 500,000 people were in the United States on student visas, according to the New York-based Institute of International Education. California was the most popular place for international students with more than 65,000.

Local officials say there are about 10,000 foreign students in San Diego County at any given time.

A foreign student can get a visa by gaining acceptance to a U.S. school. The school will issue a form the student can take to a U.S. Embassy, which issues non-immigrant visas. Then students can go to a U.S. port of entry and be admitted to the country.

The visas can come through not only universities and community colleges, but through flight schools and language schools. And the requirements for acceptance to the flight and language schools are not nearly as stringent as they are for colleges and universities.

Colleges depend on the students to tell the truth, said San Diego Community College Chancellor Augustine Gallego.

"If they come in and lie on the application, there is no way for us to determine if they are lying," he said. "Any system is breakable. When there is a human factor, people can be bought off and people can lie."

As far as the people who obtained bogus visas in the 1990s, Gallego said he thinks the so-called students from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and United Arab Emirates, among other places, sought a short cut to a highly prized diploma from an American college.

"But in retrospect, it gives you pause to think about what the motive may have been," Gallego said.

Once college officials caught on, a federal task force dubbed Operation Student Venture was formed. FBI, IRS and immigration agents worked for three years to piece together the underground network.

At the center of the scam was a Rancho Santa Fe man, Sam Koutchesfahani, whose family roots and wealth were deep in Iran. He pleaded guilty to tax evasion and fraud and was sentenced to a year in prison. He declined to comment. Koutchesfahani was the owner of a rented house in Rancho Santa Fe where 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult took their lives in 1997.

Between 1989 and 1995, the checks rolled into Koutchesfahani in amounts from $87 to $10,900. And he saw to it that people like Mesa College marketing instructor Darnell L. Hayes and San Diego City College admission administrator Richard G. Maldonaldo were paid.

In return, Hayes handed out grades to students who never set foot in his class and Maldonaldo made sure their student visas were squared away, according to federal court records.

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