Border breaches stir fears
Dallas Morning News - August 14th...
MEXICO CITY - Fears that terrorists might enter the United States via remote stretches of the border with Mexico are not based on idle chatter, according to authorities on both sides.
Dozens of bulletins and requests for help have been forwarded by U.S. intelligence agencies to their Mexican counterparts in the last year. The information triggered searches and investigations into a number of incidents. They include:
- The possible entry from Belize into Mexico's Quintana Roo state, south of Cancún, of a Middle Eastern migrant named Adnam Gushair Shukrijumah. His name reportedly matches one on a U.S. law enforcement watch list, Mexican officials said. Published reports in Mexico said the nation's law enforcement agencies have been warned by U.S. authorities that Mr. Shukrijumah previously had been tracked in Honduras and Panama.
- Flight plans in December by two men - listed by Mexican authorities as Ali M. Safia and Can Azif - whose names also scored hits on U.S. watch lists. The pair arrived in Mexico in the winter of 2003 on one-way tickets from Europe, Mexican officials said. While in Europe they also had purchased one-way tickets for a flight from the western Mexican city of Culiacán to Los Angeles. The pair failed to show for the flight and have not been seen since.
- The arrest in Tijuana in November of Imelda Ortiz Abdala, a former Mexican diplomat in Lebanon. Ms. Ortiz Abdala is accused of participating in a ring that prepared faked Mexican travel documents for migrants from Middle Eastern countries and helped smuggle them into the U.S.
"We cannot discount these incidents. We can't afford to ignore anything," said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
None of these incidents has produced proof of al-Qaeda or other related terrorist activity in Mexico, but U.S. and Mexican authorities said they are nonetheless worried.
In recent weeks, reports have circulated on the Internet about groups of Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern men marching across the U.S. border. The reports are unsubstantiated, however, and have been dismissed by both U.S. and Mexican officials.
Until recently, Mexico was used as a hideout by Basque separatists escaping justice in Spain, as well as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - groups labeled terrorist by the U.S. government. And the Mexico City newspaper Milenio recently quoted a Mexican intelligence report that chronicled the presence in Mexico of suspected Hezbollah supporters.
Since June, Mexican federal police counterterrorism units have been on heightened alert because of intelligence reports shared by U.S. officials of possible terrorist movements this summer and fall.
"We've been alerted to the concerns, and we're ready for anything. No defense is perfect, but we're trying to anticipate and plan for every kind of possible terrorist move here," said a Mexican federal police official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
On guard
Mexican authorities insist that no proven "bad Arab" has been found in Mexico since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
That, however, has not kept Mexican officials from unleashing the country's commando-style counterterrorism teams.
"Mexicans are jumping all over" the intelligence reports, said the U.S. official, referring to heightened fears among Mexicans that their country could be used as a conduit for terrorism or that terrorists could strike against U.S. interests in Mexico.
For example, reports that Mr. Shukrijumah had crossed into Mexico from Belize last month are being taken seriously, said José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, chief of Mexico's organized crime task force.
"We don't have objective evidence to confirm that he is in Mexico ... but the alert was sounded, and we are looking for him," Mr. Santiago Vasconcelos said in an interview. "Our starting point is our national security, and that's why we moved immediately to the search. ... Secondarily, it's about solidarity, more than anything, with the United States."
Another incident, shrouded in mystery, is the December planned apprehension by the Mexican counterterrorism squad of the two men of Middle Eastern origin who purchased one-way tickets to Los Angeles. The suspects reportedly were traveling with three other men.
Mexican law enforcement officials said they tracked the two men after their arrival from Europe and saw that they were scheduled to fly from Culiacán, in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. Officials determined that the pair had purchased the one-way tickets in Europe. Mexico's Special Operations Group - attached to the Federal Preventive Police - reacted and waited at the airport.
But the men never showed for the flight.
One Mexican federal police official said an investigation into the incident yielded nothing of substance. Another called it a hoax. However, a third official - a commander who participated in the investigation - said "there was something" to the Culiacán incident.
Uprooting corruption
Visa-selling and smuggling by current and former Mexican immigration agents also are of concern to anti-terrorism officials because they expose a weakness in what is otherwise considered laudable counterterrorism work by Mexican authorities.
"There continues to be concern about the institutional weakness in Mexico, especially in the area of law enforcement. There is still a lack of confidence in Mexico's abilities - the immigration enforcement is a mess," said Armand Pechard-Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Even before the Tijuana raid that nabbed Ms. Ortiz Abdala, the former consular official in Lebanon, agents from Mexico's attorney general's office had already targeted the country's National Migration Institute because of evidence of systemic corruption.
In the last two years, at least 50 former and current Mexican immigration agents and bureaucrats have been arrested and charged with corruption. A Mexican government report this week said the accused officials had registered at least $2 million worth of bank transactions and used at least 70 vehicles to smuggle people across the border.
"The U.S. has no choice but to work with Mexico and help foster its law enforcement institutions because Washington has seen the reality that we can't ensure border security on our own," said Mr. Pechard-Sverdrup, whose group recently authored a detailed analysis of the potential for terrorist strikes in Mexico. "The U.S. needs Mexico. The U.S. needs Canada."
One arrest
Exacerbating fears of terrorists using the vast and largely unpopulated border region as an entry point was the July 19 arrest of a woman who tried to board a flight from McAllen-Miller International Airport in South Texas to New York. She was apprehended by the FBI and remains in federal custody.
Farida Goolam Mahomed Ahmed had checked in for the flight, but airport personnel became suspicious. A search of her belongings yielded $7,000 in cash, muddy clothes and a mutilated South African passport.
U.S. law enforcement officials have refused to comment on Ms. Ahmed, although one said investigators "are concerned" about the incident.
Her arrest preceded a warning on July 29 from the FBI to local police in New Mexico and California of possible - although not specified - terrorist threats near the border. Subsequently, a broadcast news report from New York said a suspect tied to al-Qaeda had told U.S. officials of a plan to sneak terrorists across the U.S.-Mexico border.
