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 department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs but conceded there had been mistakes that made it easier for September 11 hijackers to enter the United States.
Powell’s admission, before the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, came one day after he accepted the resignation of Assistant Secretary Mary Ryan, the bureau’s 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 Department’s 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, we’ve 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 Department’s 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-Shannaq’s 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-Shannaq’s 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 don’t 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 Gauvey’s 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 don’t 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 officer’s 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 embassy’s 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 Department’s 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 Department’s 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
HUH? That's as stupid that 6 of the 7 had no ties to the 9-11 hijackers, then saying that 3 of the 7 LIVED with the 9-11 hijackers.
Is it me, or has the literacy rate among journalists dropped just a tad lately?