Terrorists smuggled into
America
Fox News
Terror-Linked Migrants Channeled Into U.S. Sunday July 03,
2005
TIJUANA, Mexico — A restaurateur in this border city ran
another business smuggling Lebanese compatriots into the United
States, some with connections to Hezbollah (search). A Sept. 11
commission staff report called him the only "human smuggler with
suspected links to terrorists" convicted in the United States.
But he is not unique, according to an Associated Press
investigation based on government and court records and scores of
interviews.
Many smuggling pipelines through Latin America and Canada have
illegally channeled thousands of people from countries identified
by the U.S. government as sponsors or supporters of
terrorism.
The men flocked to the cafe under the sign with the cedar
tree, symbol of their Mideast home. Here, in this alien border
land, it was the beacon that led to an Arab "brother" who would
help them complete their journey from Lebanon (search) into
America.
They would come, sometimes dozens a month over a three-year
period, to find Salim Boughader Mucharrafille (search) —
the cafe owner who drove a Mercedes and catered to some of
Tijuana's more affluent denizens, including workers at the U.S.
consulate only a short stroll away. His American customers were
unaware that the savvy boss of La Libanesa cafe ran a less
reputable business on the side.
Until his arrest in December 2002, Boughader smuggled about
200 Lebanese compatriots into the United States, including
sympathizers of Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organization by
U.S. authorities. One client, Boughader said, worked for a
Hezbollah-owned television network, which glorifies suicide
bombers and is itself on an American terror watch list.
"If they had the cedar on their passport, you were going to
help them. That's what my father taught me," Boughader told The
Associated Press from a Mexico City prison, where he faces
charges following a human-smuggling conviction in the United
States.
"What I did was help a lot of young people who wanted to work
for a better future. What's the crime in bringing your brother so
that he can get out of a war zone?"
A report released by the Sept. 11 commission staff last year
examining how terrorists travel the world cited Boughader as the
only "human smuggler with suspected links to terrorists"
convicted to date in the United States.
But after Boughader was locked up, other smugglers operating
in Lebanon, Mexico and the United States continued to help
Hezbollah-affiliated migrants in their effort to illicitly enter
from Tijuana, a U.S. immigration investigator said in Mexican
court documents obtained by the AP.
Another smuggling network that is controlled by Sri Lanka's
Tamil Tiger rebel group — a U.S.-designated terror
organization — tried sneaking four Tigers over the
California-Mexico border en route to Canada not long after the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement investigator Steven Schultz said. The four were
caught along with 17 other Sri Lankans, all posing as Mexicans,
attempting to enter ports at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa.
An AP investigation found these are just some of the many
pipelines in Central and South America, Mexico and Canada that
have illegally channeled thousands of people into the United
States from so-called "special-interest" countries — those
identified by the U.S. government as sponsors or supporters of
terrorism.
Even when caught, illegal immigrants from those countries and
other nations are sometimes released while awaiting deportation
hearings, then miss those court dates, according to the AP's
investigation, which also documented deep concerns about security
threats along the lightly patrolled, 4,000-mile U.S.-Canada
border.
The AP reviewed hundreds of pages of court indictments,
affidavits, congressional testimony and government reports, and
conducted dozens of interviews in Mexico and the United States to
determine how migrants from countries with terrorist ties were
brought illegally to America — and how the smugglers they
hired operated throughout the world.
Many of the travelers, unassociated with any extremist group,
genuinely came fleeing war or in search of economic opportunity.
But some, once in the United States, committed fraud to obtain
Social Security numbers, driver's licenses or false immigration
documents, U.S. court records showed.
Worse, the boldness of the smuggling enterprises, the
difficulty of shutting them down and their potential to be used
as terrorist conduits trouble many security officials.
Lebanese carpenter Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, smuggled in over
the California border, admitted spending part of his time in the
United States raising money to send back to his country to
support Hezbollah — at least $40,000, according to an FBI
affidavit. Kourani, court records said, told the FBI that his
brother is the group's chief of military security in southern
Lebanon, where Hezbollah is widely admired as a resistance
force.
U.S. homeland security officials maintain they know of no
cases of Al Qaeda operatives using smuggling operations to enter
the United States via traditional routes over the northern or
southern boundaries, though they have warned that recent
intelligence suggests the terror group is eyeing the borders as a
way in.
At least one Al Qaeda-linked man smuggled himself over the
border. Nabil al-Marabh, a now-deported Syrian citizen once No.
27 on the FBI's list of terror suspects and accused by Canadian
authorities of having connections to Usama bin Laden's network,
was caught sneaking from Canada into New York in the back of a
tractor-trailer in June 2001 with a fake Canadian passport.
"Several Al Qaeda leaders believe operatives can pay their way
into the country through Mexico and also believe illegal entry is
more advantageous than legal entry," Jim Loy, deputy secretary of
the Department of Homeland Security, told a congressional
committee in February. Further, he said, "entrenched human
smuggling networks and corruption in areas beyond our borders can
be exploited by terrorist organizations."
The Boughader case and others show just how easy it would be
— even now, nearly four years after Sept. 11.
Just weeks ago, a federal grand jury in Phoenix indicted an
Iranian tailor on charges of attempting to bring illegal
immigrants from his native country over the Arizona-Mexico
border.
"Today they could be smuggling people, tomorrow weapons," said
John Torres, deputy assistant director for smuggling and public
safety investigations at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or
ICE. "The vulnerability there is a criminal or terrorist
organization could take advantage of that existing
infrastructure."
What the records reveal is a labyrinth of networks, which use
established routes frequented for years by migrants of many
nationalities.
Smugglers employ recruiters and facilitators in such
"special-interest" countries as Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and
Pakistan. One immigrant, in testimony against a now-convicted
smuggler, described a "market of passports" in northern Iraq
where individuals could illegally purchase documents to aid
travel to America.
These smugglers use staging areas and transportation
coordinators in such places as Quito, Ecuador; Lima, Peru; Cali,
Colombia; and Guatemala City. They pay foot guides, drivers and
stash-house operators in Mexico and the United States.
They have moved people by plane — into suburban
Washington, D.C., Florida, California. And they have crossed
clients in vehicles or on foot into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
California and over the Canadian border, then helped deliver them
to destinations across America.
They have partnered with other smugglers transporting Mexican
or Central American migrants, sometimes swapping clients and
transferring immigrants from "special-interest" countries and
other migrants in the same loads.
"This is really a word-of-mouth business," said Laura
Ingersoll, an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who
has prosecuted at least a half-dozen smugglers who moved illegal
immigrants from Egypt and Iraq into the United States.
"People from places in the Middle East will hear about who to
go through, and they tend to be people from their same country,
but once you get into the system we saw associations that really
were driven by, `What's the most effective way for me to move my
product?'" she said. "I may call someone else and essentially
sell my load to somebody who's got a boat or a truck or something
going out. It's just like sacks of potatoes."
"A Mafia," is how one of Boughader's clients, Roland Nassib
Maksoud, once described the business.
Maksoud, a liquor distributor, traveled from Lebanon to Mexico
on a legal visa in late 2000, he told investigators, according to
Mexican court documents. In Mexico, he said, he met two
compatriots who passed along the name of a restaurateur in
Tijuana who smuggled Lebanese into the United States. They had
gotten the name, Boughader, from a Beirut vendor who charged them
$2,000 each for their visas to Mexico.
When Maksoud found the cafe, three Lebanese men were out front
eating.
"Salim is inside," they told him in Arabic.
Boughader was meticulous about both his professions. He kept a
spiral notebook with the names of his smuggling clients, their
phone numbers and the date they arrived at his restaurant. In a
separate ledger, Boughader told the AP, he recorded the names and
numbers of his cafe customers and their favorite dishes.
He went over instructions with his newest client. Maksoud was
to get a room at a nearby hotel, which he would share with
another Lebanese man waiting to cross. The fee would be $2,000 up
front, plus another $2,000 once Maksoud was in the States.
In January 2001, Maksoud was taken to a house on the Mexican
side where other migrants were awaiting passage —
"different people from different nationalities," he told
investigators.
One morning at 1 o'clock, he was awakened, crammed into the
trunk of a vehicle and told not to make a sound as the car made
its way through the border port of entry, a five-minute ride.
The journey north was more arduous for other Boughader
clients. One stated in a Mexican court document that he trekked
for four hours over the hills into California with Lebanese and
Mexican migrants. A guide brought up the rear, erasing their
footprints.
Other people-couriers use altered passports to fly clients to
the United States. One of them, convicted smuggler Mohammed
Hussein Assadi, schooled his Iraqi customers to carry nothing
identifying them as Arab while traveling. He advised one migrant
to shave his mustache, another to dye her hair blonde, still
another to get a "European" haircut, U.S. court records
showed.
Central and South America are popular transit points because
of their proximity to the United States and the relative ease
with which migrants from countries with terrorist ties can obtain
tourist visas there — either legally or through bribery.
Assadi, an Iranian, worked from Ecuador, sometimes using the
alias Antonio Roosevelt Choez Arreaga. He spoke Spanish in
addition to Farsi and Arabic.
Bribery is another common tool for the organizations.
Boughader's clients told U.S. and Mexican investigators they
paid thousands of dollars to obtain fraudulent visas from
Mexico's consular office in Beirut. A woman who oversaw the
office between 1998 and 2001 was arrested on charges of
participating in the smuggling scheme.
In May, the former director of immigration in Honduras was
arrested, accused of selling hundreds of Honduran passports to
migrants from Lebanon, China, Cuba and Colombia — possibly
to aid their entry into the United States. The investigation
continues.
Maximiano Ramos, a former Los Angeles supervisor with the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service, admitted taking $12,500
to smuggle immigrants from the Philippines, home of the Al
Qaeda-linked militant group Abu Sayyaf. From 1996 to 2002, at
least 40 migrants were diverted from connecting flights at Los
Angeles International Airport and escorted out by security guards
while Ramos was on duty.
Linda Sesi, an assistant ombudsman for the city of Detroit, is
awaiting trial on charges of conspiring with four others to
smuggle more than 200 migrants from Iraq, Jordan and other Middle
Eastern countries into the United States from 2001 up until her
arrest last September. The defendants allegedly charged clients
more than $6,000 for tourist visas to South America and then,
using falsified documents, flew them to Dulles airport outside
Washington, D.C.
Some, including prosecutor Ingersoll, discount human smuggling
as "a risky road" not likely to be traveled by terror operatives.
But a former Sept. 11 commission counsel, Janice Kephart, said
smuggling already is a chosen transportation mode for such
groups.
Intelligence suggests that since 1999 human smugglers have
facilitated the travel of terrorists associated with more than a
dozen extremist groups, according to the Sept. 11 commission's
terrorist travel report Kephart helped write. Prior to Sept. 11,
Al Qaeda employed smugglers to get jihad recruits into
Afghanistan for training, the report said.
Terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, "use human smugglers and
document forgers to a great extent," Kephart said. "They know
their value. It only makes sense that they would transfer that to
infiltrate the United States."
Others noted that post-Sept. 11 security measures — more
stringent visa requirements and security at airports and ports of
entry — have made it tougher for terrorist operatives to
seek legal passage.
"If you're a terrorist group looking to do something ... why
not send them another route?" said Walter Purdy, director of the
Terrorism Research Center in Burke, Va. "These people on the
border, they don't come up and say, `We're part of Hezbollah.'
They say, `I want to get a job in America' or `I'm going to see
my cousin in New York. Can you get me in?' The guy will say, `How
much money do you have?'"
Dismantling groups smuggling people from countries with
terrorist ties is a priority, said Torres, the U.S. immigration
official. But often when one smuggler is busted another eagerly
fills his shoes.
Following Boughader's arrest, smuggling of Lebanese through
Tijuana ceased for several months, ICE investigator Ramon Romo
said in court documents filed in Mexico. Then some Lebanese men
were apprehended at the Tijuana airport and another by the U.S.
Border Patrol, and in April 2003 intelligence revealed that five
members of Hezbollah were preparing to cross the border, Romo
stated.
The information was passed on to Mexican authorities, who made
some arrests.
Others have made it through.
Kourani, who helped raise donations for Hezbollah, entered the
United States via the Lebanon-Tijuana pipeline, paying $3,000 in
Beirut to get a Mexican visa, according to federal court
documents. On Feb. 4, 2001, he and another man were smuggled into
California in the hidden compartment of a vehicle.
Last month, Kourani was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison for
conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist group. His
lawyer, William Swor, said Kourani is not a member of Hezbollah
and hasn't spoken in years with the brother who has a leadership
role in the group. Prosecutors alleged the brother directed
Kourani's U.S. activities.
ICE spokesman Manny Van Pelt refused to confirm that Boughader
smuggled Kourani. Boughader himself couldn't specifically recall
Mahmoud Kourani, though he noted he moved a number of people with
the last name "Kourani" who were from Mahmoud Kourani's hometown
of Yater, Lebanon, a longtime Hezbollah outpost.
Boughader acknowledged transporting a Lebanese man who worked
at al-Manar, a global satellite television network owned and
operated by Hezbollah. The U.S. State Department added al-Manar
to its Terror Exclusion List in 2004, meaning anyone associated
with the station may be refused entry or deported from the United
States.
"For us, Hezbollah are not terrorists," said Boughader, a
Mexican of Lebanese descent, echoing the feelings of most
Lebanese. "I regret that what I was doing is against the law, but
I don't regret what I did to help people."
Along the border, people are still getting such help day in
and day out.
After Sept. 11, Boughader said, "I changed my phone numbers
and told my sister if a Lebanese showed up at the restaurant to
turn him away. But they kept coming." And, for at least nine more
months, he kept smuggling, he admitted when he pleaded guilty in
the United States.
"The checks they do at the border are still very bad," he
said, "because, regardless of everything, it is still easy to
cross."
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