Thread: TX: Smuggling ring had help from Mexican official

Web Posted: 10/01/2008 12:00 CDT

Smuggling ring had help from Mexican official

Todd Bensman- Express-News

With help from a bribed official in Mexico's Belize consulate office, two men from Ghana ran a transcontinental smuggling operation that ferried dozens of unauthorized immigrants into Texas from countries the State Department regards as terrorist havens, federal court records and interviews show.

Since at least 2005, the operation helped as many as 100 U.S.-bound immigrants, paying as little as $5,000 each, from such countries as Sudan and Somalia, travel by air and ground to Mexico and then over the U.S. border to Houston.

Some of the money ended up in the pockets of at least one Mexican Consulate employee in Belize whose corruption, the two ringleaders have now confessed, provided the crucial link in the pipeline.

A U.S. national security investigation involving Belize and Mexican law enforcement agencies shut the pipeline down with the arrests last fall of Ghana native Mohammed Kamel Ibrahim, based in Mexico City, and Sampson Lovelace Boateng, a Ghanan who lived in Belize.

Both men — Boateng was arrested in Miami and Ibrahim was extradited from Mexico — pleaded guilty last week in Washington, D.C., to charges related to the smuggling. Each faces up to 15 years in prison.

Immigrants brought in by Boateng and Ibrahim hailed from African nations where anti-American terrorist groups are active and spreading, raising the specter that some of them might have entered undetected with ill intent.

Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Homeland Security and formerly a senior FBI administrator, said such complex operations provide a possible conduit for terrorists.

“It's not the ones we catch that we're concerned about, since they're no longer a threat; it's the ones we have not caught, or will not catch. Anybody from a country with known terrorism links is one too many,â€

So, we are headed down a slippery slope the more we have to deal with the Mexican diplomatic service? No telling what other schemes might be taking place within their numerous Departments.