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An Iraqi Kurd who federal authorities say tried to help a senior al-Qaida operative gain entry to the United States was ordered deported today. Immigration Judge Kenneth Josephson found that Sam Malkandi, of Kirkland, lied on his 1998 asylum application when he said he had been imprisoned in Iran for possessing forbidden political materials. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators say that in 2003, Malkandi tried to help Tawfiq bin Attash obtain a U.S. visa. The one-legged bin Attash, a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, also known as Khallad, is suspected of helping plan the attack on the USS Cole...

Federal agents scored an important victory in their effort to deport a 47-year-old native and citizen of Iraq with ties to a senior al Qaeda operative suspected of helping plan the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and the 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Based on evidence presented by Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys during a series of hearings that concluded earlier this month, Immigration Judge Kenneth Josephson yesterday ordered Sam Malkandi, a resident of Kirkland, Washington, removed from the United States. The Judge, who had earlier held that Malkandi was a national...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — They knelt in prayer, ignored the judge and wouldn't listen to Arabic translations as they confronted nearly 3,000 counts of murder. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four co-defendants defiantly disrupted an arraignment that dragged into Saturday night in the opening act of the long-stalled effort to prosecute them in a military court. It wasn't until more than seven hours into the hearing that prosecutors at the U.S. military base in Cuba began reading the charges against the men, including 2,976 counts of murder and terrorism in the 2001 attacks...

Note: The following text is a quote: May 6, 2010 ICE deports Iraqi national with ties to Al Qaeda operatives SEATTLE - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today announced that an Iraqi citizen, who had ties to an Al Qaeda leader and was deemed a national security risk by a federal immigration judge, an administrative appeals court and a federal appeals court, was recently removed to his native country. Sam Malkandi, 51, was living in Kirkland, Wash., in 1999 when he attempted to fraudulently obtain a U.S. visa for Tawfiq bin Attash to travel here and purportedly receive medical...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has extended for two more years the imprisonment of a terror suspect linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological weapons, saying he has more information about terrorist operations. Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist and former Malaysian army captain, was arrested in late 2001 as he returned home from Afghanistan, where officials say he was working on a biological and chemical weapons program for al-Qaeda that was ended by the U.S.-led war. Since then, he has been held without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act on accusations of being a member of Jemaah...

According to documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told U.S. investigators after his capture last year that a high-ranking Qaeda lieutenant known as Khallad originally was "selected" to participate in the 9/11 attacks as a "bouncer"--one of the musclemen assigned to corral and subdue passengers on a hijacked plane. Khallad, a one-legged Yemeni also known as Tawfiq bin Attash, attended a January 2000 "summit" meeting in Malaysia at which he allegedly went over plans for 9/11 with two future hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. After the meeting, Almihdhar and Alhazmi traveled to the United States....