Posted on 07/12/2002 10:03:45 PM PDT by Shermy
MILWAUKEE (AP) Federal authorities have found seven people in Wisconsin suspected of bribing U.S. embassy officials in the Persian Gulf to obtain illegal visas. Six of the seven don't appear to have terrorist ties, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Francis D. Schmitz.
He said little is known about the seventh person, Ahmad Abed Atia, 23, who had been living in Milwaukee. Atia was uncooperative with investigators and has been transferred to Chicago on a federal visa fraud charge, Schmitz said.
The seven are part of a larger group of foreigners from Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and Bangladesh suspected to have paid at least $10,000 each to an employee at the U.S. Embassy in Qatar between April 2000 and July 2001. Authorities said in exchange they received six-month visas without security screening or U.S. government authorization.
Three of the group are believed to have lived with the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Two of the seven people found in Wisconsin have family ties to the state.
Sammah Essa Batayneh, 23, had been living in Racine and working at her husband's grocery store. She was released on her own recognizance pending further court hearings in Chicago.
Yasser Abdelghani, 33, was working at a gas station in Kenosha. He was released from federal custody and turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
He could be deported.
His wife and children, ages 4 and 6, also had illegal visas but were not taken into custody, Schmitz said.
The INS picked up another of the seven, a 31-year-old man, in Milwaukee. His name was not released.
He has not been charged, but his case remains under investigation, Schmitz said.
"Those released by the court were found not to be dangerous to society," Schmitz said.
Immigration fraud isn't uncommon, but authorities gave the Qatar bribes special attention after one of the group admitted he had lived in Virginia with two men, Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhazmi, who were suspected of hijacking the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
Two other men suspected of paying for visas at the Qatar embassy also roomed with the hijackers. One of them, Ahmed Ahmad, was in custody, law enforcement officials said.
They did not release the name of the third man, saying he remained at large.
No embassy officials have been charged so far.
Two weeks ago, U.S. marshals in Wisconsin apprehended two Jordanians, Bilal Z. Shihadeh and Mohmud Z. Shehadeh, both 20, accused of entering the country using false Danish passports.
Citizens of western European countries, including Denmark, don't need visas to visit the United States because of international immigration agreements. Passports from those countries are in great demand among people trying to sneak into the United States, authorities said.
Shihadeh and Shehadeh had been living in Milwaukee with a relative who entered the country with a legal Brazilian passport.
Officials in Florida are prosecuting the men's case because they entered the country in that state.
None of us really know what is going on in the State Dept., but, so far, what have they done wrong? Watch the movie folks, not the snapshots
Robert McManus is a (Alaskan) humor writer the guy lives in Fairbanks Alaska. Makes you kind of wonder.
Well, I guess it is fun to react. To be fair, I will admit that my first thought on reading that some of them were being released is that they will most probably (and hopefully) be followed by a tail that happens to work for an agency known by its 3 letter acronym, starting with an F and ending with an I. All too often, we expect to know about what is really going on when in rality, we don't. I think a lot of the administration's public PC posturing is necessary, but in reality cannot possibly be complete picture.
RECORDS AT US EMBASSY IN DOHA TAMPERED WITH
By Warren P Strobel and Cassio Furtado
WASHINGTON: Three men who allegedly bought visas at the US embassy in Qatar have links with September 11 hijackers, federal authorities have said.
The news came after a top Washington official resigned in the wake of the scandal that allowed at least 70 people to slip into the US illegally.
On Thursday, Secretary of State Colin Powell defended his departments Bureau of Consular Affairs but conceded there had been mistakes that made it easier for September 11 hijackers to enter the United States.
Powells admission, before the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, came one day after he accepted the resignation of Assistant Secretary Mary Ryan, the bureaus chief, though he denied to the press that her departure had anything to do with events in Qatar.
In a newspaper interview in November, Ryan had warned that her officials were stretched just about as thin as they can possibly be. We do not have the personnel resources that we need to do the job the way it should be done.
Investigators are now studying whether some corrupt officials at the embassy in Doha unwittingly helped Al Qaeda to carry out the September 11 attacks. It was already known that many of the hijackers skirted safeguards in the State Departments visa issuance rules to get into the United States.
The focus of our investigation ... has been national security and whether or not terrorists used this scheme (in Qatar) to help plan attacks on the United States, a senior State Department official said.
Powell told the homeland security committee that consular services had had problems from time to time, but he added that since September 11, weve done a lot to tighten up our system.
The main improvement, Powell said, was to more than double the size of intelligence databases available to State Departments 1,995 visa applicant screeners at more than 200 posts worldwide. Those screeners reviewed more than 10mn applicants last year, approving about 7.5mn for papers that enabled foreigners to enter the United States legally.
Officials originally thought they were dealing with a visa fraud, which is not unusual. The case leaped to national importance when Rasmi Subhi Salah al-Shannaq, one of the alleged visa buyers, admitted to FBI agents on June 24 that he had roomed with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Hani Hanjour in a three-bedroom apartment in Northern Virginia.
Al-Shannaq had denied knowing the hijackers in his initial FBI interview on January 22.
At a pre-trial hearing in Baltimore on Wednesday, Assistant US Attorney Harvey Eisenberg acknowledged that the government had no evidence to link al-Shannaq criminally to the two hijackers. According to Eisenberg, al-Shannaq had sought and failed to obtain a US visa using four other passports, including one that had a different number and two others with different birth dates.
Eisenberg said the Justice Department was still looking for them and did not know whether the passports had been used for travel.
The only trips al-Shannaq made with his current passport were from Jordan to Qatar and to the United States, Eisenberg said.
According to State Department officials, al-Shannaqs improper visa cost $10,000.
Eisenberg and the officials said two other individuals who obtained phony visas from the US embassy in Qatar also shared an apartment with hijackers Alhazmi and Hanjour.
One of them, Ahmed Ahmad, was in detention, according to law enforcement officials. The identity of the third man was not disclosed, but the officials said he was at large.
Al-Shannaqs lawyer, Jim Wyda, said that al-Shannaq lived in one room of a three-bedroom Northern Virginia apartment, while the two hijackers lived in another room. He had no significant relationship with them, Wyda said.
While Eisenberg admitted he could not link al-Shannaq to criminal activities of the hijackers, he added, I dont know that they (the hijackers) stayed with any non-hijackers for any length of time.
These 19 ... stuck to themselves, he said.
Unimpressed, US Magistrate Susan Gauvey ordered al-Shannaq released on $434,000 bail. He cannot be guilty by association, she said. The government immediately appealed, but a federal district judge on Wednesday afternoon upheld Gauveys ruling.
Al-Shannaq was not released, however, but was turned over to the Immigration and Naturalisation Service to face a related charge that he had overstayed his visa.
All told, visas were issued improperly from the US embassy in Qatar to at least 38 Jordanian citizens and 28 Pakistanis, as well as citizens of Bangladesh and Syria, State Department officials said.
The FBI has taken 31 into custody and is still looking for 29 individuals, the officials said. Five are children or spouses of improper visa holders, they said, and the remainder have left the country.
The visa fraud case began in November, when federal authorities received a tip alleging that al-Shannaq had fraudulently purchased a visa in Qatar, officials said.
We dont know exactly how it was accomplished, a State Department official said. The system has a lot of safeguards and checks in it.
He said there was evidence that records at the embassy in Qatar were tampered with to cover up evidence of the fraud, which authorities say occurred between July 2000 and May 2001.
Authorities have questioned current and former embassy employees, but no charges have been filed or administrative action taken against US citizens, State Department officials said.
A US consular officers approval is required for any visa to be issued, officials said. The signatures of three different officers appeared on one or more improperly issued visas but that did not mean they were aware of the fraud, the officials said.
A Jordanian citizen who was employed by the embassy and resigned in June 2001 is co-operating as a witness, though that person did not work in the embassys consular section.
A State Department spokesman said investigators were performing checks at all US posts overseas to ensure that the same type of fraud did not occur elsewhere.
Powell told lawmakers he backed major changes that would give oversight of US visa policies to the proposed Department of Homeland Security. He insisted, however, that the State Departments consular officials must continue to operate the system.
We have the experience, the training, the language skills and the dedicated people, he told lawmakers.
Homeland Security personnel would have authority to investigate visa applicants, train visa screeners and reject applicants suspected of links to terrorism, under an administration proposal that the House is expected to endorse as early as next week.
The sharpest critic of the State Departments visa handling, Representative James Sensenbrenner, who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had proposed that responsibility for issuing visas be turned over to the new department. That failed by an 18-15 vote on Wednesday in the House International Relations Committee. - KRT
Three of the[larger] group are believed to have lived with the Sept. 11 hijackers.
GET IT?
"They [the Soviets] intend...to induce the Americans to adopt their own 'restructuring' and convergence of the Soviet and American systems using to this end the fear of nuclear conflict.... Convergence will be accompanied by blood baths and political re-education camps in Western Europe and the United States. The Soviet strategists are counting on an economic depression in the United States and intend to introduce their reformed model of socialism with a human face as an alternative to the American system during the depression." ...Anatoliy Golitsyn The Perestroika Deception 1990.Mt 6:24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Islam means "submit or we'll kill you," their Koran tells them so. Without strong leadership which chooses the God of Jews and Christians instead of the god of Muslims (Allah = Satan) or the middle ground about to be spewed out, America will be forced to submit to the Islamic invasion and takeover by the demon-possessed Islamics. The picture above is merely one altercation along the way. If the blonde does not submit now, she may be one who they intend to re-educate later on along the lines of Anatoliy Golitsyn's statement above or simply rape and murder as they have done elsewhere. The Muslims hate red, white and blue and intend to have the colors of the U.S. be white, red, black and green -- the colors of the four horsemen and the Arab Coalition.
Monsanto's colors on Round-Up Renew are the same colors as the flag of that murderer Arafat. The same colors as the four horses of Revelation 6:1-8. See post #65 by Thinkin' Gal and the link there explaining the colors: Pan-Arab Colours [same as four horses]
Repent hard, the Day of the Lord and of great tribulation is at hand.
Mohammed Atta. Do these clowns all have the same name?
Never happen. Last time someone (McCarthy) tried something similar, exposing active communists, he got crucified.
The federal government isn't a case of a few bad apples in the barrel, it is a case of a few good apples in a barrel full of bad ones.
There not supposed to appear to be terrorists until they're shoving a box cutter against your jugular or blasting innocents at an airline ticket counter.
Get 'em out my country, sonovabeech lawyer.
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