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WASHINGTON (AP) - A Lebanese man who says he attended an al-Qaida training camp was charged Friday with lying to federal authorities about shipments of communications equipment seized by the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, 41, was charged in a U.S. District Court in Minnesota, one of several places he's lived in the United States. A federal judge in New York, where Elzahabi has been held since his arrest in May, held a hearing for Elzahabi and ordered him transferred to Minneapolis to face two counts of making false statements to federal investigators. A criminal complaint by FBI...

A Senegalese man accused of carrying false documents and a training manual for transporting hazardous materials will remain jailed in Atlanta until a hearing next week. The man, who identified himself as Papa Mamour Keita, 38, said he had lived in and worked in Atlanta for nearly three years until July 2001 and again since Sept. 11. On Thursday, three companies in metro Atlanta confirmed him as a former employee, and a firm in Austell said he had done driving training there. The FBI arrested him in Atlanta on Tuesday and charged him with fraudulently obtaining a Social Security number....

Five New York City men with ties to the Middle East were indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday for their part in an alleged scheme to fraudulently obtain Tennessee driver's licenses. In the indictment on one count of conspiracy to commit fraud, federal authorities shed no new light on the death of state license examiner Katherine Smith. Smith and the five men were charged in a Feb. 6 criminal complaint on an identical conspiracy charge. Smith died Feb. 10 in a fiery car crash on U.S. 72 in Fayette County, the day before she was to appear at a ...

MEMPHIS, Tenn.- Three of four men charged in a Tennessee driver's license fraud case pleaded guilty Monday in federal court. Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin, Khaled Odtllah and Sakher A. Hammad each admitted before U.S. District Court Judge Bernice Donald that they tried to obtain the licenses illegally. The fourth defendant, Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad, was to appear in court Monday afternoon. Each of the four men, three from New York City and one from the Memphis suburb of Cordova, had ties to the Middle East. The men were charged with operating a scam in which driver's license examiner Katherine Smith would provide...

One of five suspects in a drivers license fraud ring was released Thursday after his father agreed to put up property, including his Staten Island home, as bond. Federal prosecutor Tim DiScenza dropped opposition to Sakher A. Hammad's release after his father, Peter Hansen, a civil engineer employed by New York City government, signed the $250,000 bond. But DiScenza fought a bid for bail by co-defendant Khaled Odtllah. U.S. Dist. Judge Bernice Donald is scheduled to rule Monday on that matter. DiScenza also told Donald that the government wants separate trials in rapid succession for the five defendants, with Odtllah,...

The head of a Hispanic civil rights organization says she knows of six or seven incidents over the past two years in which illegal aliens paid an unidentified state driver's license bureau employee in Memphis to obtain fake identification. The assertion by Dilka Roman, Tennessee director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), comes as authorities continue to investigate the mysterious death last month of a driver's license examiner linked to a license-selling scheme. Roman said she reported some of what she knew to Memphis police several months before the FBI opened an investigation this winter into an ...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - A driver's license examiner and five others, including three alleged illegal aliens, were charged in a plot to buy phony Tennessee licenses for $1,000 apiece. According to an FBI complaint filed Wednesday, illegal aliens Mohammed Fares, Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin and Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad drove from New York to obtain licenses. The complaint said the trio were met outside a testing center Tuesday by Sakhera Hammad and Khaled Odtllah, alleged middlemen who filled out the necessary paperwork, charging them each $1,000. Testing center examiner Katherine Smith then issued the licenses under the names of Fares and two others, ...

A photo ID pass for Sept. 5 found on one of the men charged with fraudulently obtaining a Tennessee driver's license from a Memphis woman gave him access to the six underground levels of the One World Center building. But which tenant hired Sakher 'Rocky' Hammad, 24, to work on its sprinklers is lost, said Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman Alan Hicks on Friday. Hammad told federal authorities that he was working on the sprinklers six days before the twin towers were brought down by terrorists, court testimony revealed this week. But Hicks said the Port ...

Flaming death no accident, FBI says Gasoline found on clothes of license examiner By Bill Dries dries@gomemphis.com The fiery death of a driver's license examiner at the center of a federal fraud investigation was not an accident, an FBI agent said here Wednesday in federal court. "Katherine Smith obviously lived two lives, maybe more. She may have had other things going on in her life that may have led to her death." - Karen Cicala Federal and state investigators found gasoline on the clothes Katherine Smith was wearing when she died Sunday in a car crash on a stretch of ...

The fiery death of a driver's license examiner at the center of a federal fraud investigation was not an accident, an FBI agent said here Wednesday in federal court. Federal and state investigators found gasoline on the clothes Katherine Smith was wearing when she died Sunday in a car crash on a stretch of U.S. 72 in Fayette County, FBI agent J. Suzanne Nash told U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Daniel Breen. Nash also testified that investigators found evidence of some kind of accelerant in the burned-out interior of Smith's car. "Katherine Smith obviously lived two lives, maybe more. She may ...