Database: National Security Vetting Failures

Ethiopian Citizen Kefelegn Alemu Worku entered the United States and settled in Colorado in November 2004 on a family refugee status claim established in Kenya. In November 2006, he applied for lawful permanent residence and received it in 2008, then applied for U.S. citizenship on November 22, 2009, which he received in under 13 weeks.

But the false name the Ethiopian successfully submitted on all three applications – Habteab Berhe Temanu – covered up the fact that, eight years earlier, Ethiopia had publicly convicted him of genocide and sentenced him to death in absentia for torturing to death at least 101 and as many as 150 people during the 1977-80 “Red Terror” campaign, which was a ruthless political purge targeting those suspected of opposing the Marxist regime of the time.

Worku committed these crimes while working as a prison guard at the notorious Higher 15 detention camp during the purge years. Later witness testimony had Worku conducting beatings and torture sessions using a cattle prod, rifle butts, whips and pipes, burning newspapers, and cigarettes, and shot dead both adults and children, court records show. One witness testified, for instance, that the “bloodthirsty monster”, after executing several prisoners, ordered other prisoners to drink the shed blood and lick the blood clean with their tongues.

Ethiopia’s 2000 prosecution could have made his face and name publicly knowable and potentially discoverable in three separate security vettings, but so too could his initial identity fraud.

U.S. government agencies missed three opportunities to discover Worku, two of them from 2008 onward. After fleeing Ethiopia, Worku lived in Kenya for 13 years. In about early 2004, he slotted himself into the identity of an Ethiopian father of five who was dying as he and his family in Kenya were about to be granted provisional refugee status and admittance to the United States.

At the invitation of the ill man’s wife and older children, Worku then falsely claimed parenthood of the four children to ensure the application would go through. Worku has denied committing the atrocities but admitted that he slotted himself into the refugee family at the behest of the man who eventually did die the following year, in 2005.

“The father of the kids that I brought here…[he} was sick and on his death bed. He entreated me to take his kids to the United States because he didn’t want his kids to miss that opportunity of coming to the United States,” Worku told a judge during a hearing in Denver.

USCIS refugee affairs personnel on the ground potentially could have uncovered the fraud by checking with the Ethiopian government for wanted convicted war crimes fugitives, or merely by interviewing the family members individually at length for discrepancies and comparing their testimony against Worku’s personal history during his long years living in Kenya.

He lived for years as a Denver-area parking attendant before a former victim in May 2011 recognized him by chance in a local café and tipped off federal ICE Homeland Security Investigations. After his Colorado discovery, an ICE investigator easily coaxed from all of the children that Woku was an “imposter”, court records show.

On July 12, 2004, however, he entered the United States with the man’s wife and five children.

A second chance for the U.S. government to discover this fraud came came and went in 2008, when the USCIS granted Worku lawful permanent residence. A third opportunity was lost after Worku applied for U.S. citizenship on November 22, 2009 and was granted it on March 2, 2010.

USCIS granted these benefits despite the Ethiopian court’s 2000 conviction.

In May 2011, Homeland Security Investigations received information from an informant who was a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Ethiopia. The informant was a former prisoner of Higher 15 who recognized Worku at the Cozy Cafe in Aurora, Colorado.

On October 11, 2013, a federal jury convicted Worku for unlawfully procuring citizenship or naturalization, aggravated identity theft, and fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other documents. In May 2014, a federal judge sentenced him to 22 years in federal prison and revoked his U.S. citizenship.

Iraqi citizen Yousif Al-Mashhadani, his brother Adil Hasan Al-Mashhadani, and his brother’s wife Enas Ibrahim entered the United States together as refugees in 2008. They claimed persecution stories involving victimhood at the hands of al-Qaeda in Iraq and settled in the Fairfax, Va., area.

But US Citizenship and Immigration Services security screeners based in Amman, Jordan, granted their provisional refugee petitions despite discoverable intelligence information from a U.S. military raid in 2005 that recovered the fingerprint of Yousif inside a deplorable underground al-Qaeda torture bunker where kidnapped westerners were freed, including American contractor Roy Hallums, an FBI complaint affidavit much later revealed. While it’s unclear from public information why Yousif's fingerprints taken for his refugee application in Jordan three years later did not get matched to the one in U.S. possession, UCIS reviewers in Jordan also missed other family ties to the particularly murderous branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq and to the torture bunker.

It was that Yousif and his other brother, Adil Hasan, hid the existence of another problematic brother, Majid Al Mashhadani, who was working directly with al-Qaeda and helped his terrorist group kidnap Hallums, who was kept for nearly a year blindfolded in a deplorable underground torture bunker, a later FBI investigation found. When U.S. military forces freed Hallums and other captives in the 2005 raid, they arrested Majid at the site. The Iraqi government imprisoned him for two years in Iraq.

It was the U.S.-based FBI investigation that matched Yousif's fingerprints to the torture bunker and also uncovered the brotherly connection to Majid at the al-Qaeda bunker, not any routine security vetting associated with refugee or permanent immigration applications, including one in May 2013 for naturalized citizenship. The FBI found the fingerprint match in a separate investigation six months after the citizenship applications were filed, in November 2013. Court records do not elaborate on government thinking about the Yousif Al-Mashhadani fingerprint. But whether this refuge-granted brother was a terrorist operative, too, the investigation also found that all three refugees, including Adil’s wife, Enas Ibrahim, wittingly covered up their disqualifying relationships to the arrested kidnapper brother on at least two occasions.

The first was during the 2007-2008 USCIS security screening for the provisional refugee applications in Iraq. A second opportunity passed when they secured their change-of-status applications in the United States for lawful permanent residence sometime later in 2008, and a third came and went in 2013 when the trio applied for naturalized citizenship.

The misses seemed particularly egregious in light of other information apparently at the fingertips of adjudicators. In his first refugee application, for instance, Hasan filled out a “Worldwide Refugee Admissions Family Tree” report in which he omitted the al-Qaeda brother who'd been imprisoned after the American bunker raid. He also dropped his own “Al Mashhadani” family name as part of the ruse, keeping the alias "Adil Hasan" permanently after they settled in Virginia. But these ruses were discoverable because of yet a fourth brother who'd entered the United States earlier.

The fourth brother identified in court records only as “A.M.”, a ranking Iraqi police official who would have been listed in the family tree document, also applied for refugee status in 2007. In August of that year, the Iraqi police official brother provided the American agency with all of the information about the terrorist brother and fully identified all of his other brothers to USCIS adjudicators. They were all in searchable databases.

Information that all the brothers were biologically related (one therefore revealed as not listed in applications), nearly a year before Hasan’s application was granted, was therefore available through basic fact-finding and would have enabled adjudicators to link them all and discover the omissions.

Secondly, a fingerprint check of Yousif Al-Mashhadani likely was never conducted as required under post-9/11 security screening reforms. Otherwise, a fingerprint database check should have discovered his fingerprint had been collected from inside the bunker, flagged the refugee applicant as a likely terrorist operative as well, and doomed the initial early applications of all three.

Third, the FBI in 2016 found the persecution stories that both brothers and Enas Ibrahim initially provided to USCIS adjudicators were riddled with simple discrepancies that seemed easily discoverable.

Under FBI questioning about these back-story discrepancies, all were forced to admit to making up the basic facts of their claims years after USCIS adjudicators apparently accepted them at face value. In short, federal criminal investigation following the basic footsteps of immigration security screening – rather than the other way around – turned up the derogatory information necessary to reveal the deceits.

Yousif Al-Mashhadani was arrested in March 2017, after eight years of ineligible living inside the United States. He pleaded guilty to immigration fraud, was sentenced to time served and submitted to deportation proceedings.