Court records say Kourani was a ranking Hezbollah insider in Lebanon who had received specialized training in radical Shiite fundamentalism, weaponry, spy craft and counterintelligence in Lebanon and Iran. The government described one of his brothers as Hezbollah's Chief of Military Security for Southern Lebanon.
But Kourani holds a rarely acknowledged distinction: He is one of only a handful of Middle Easterners smuggled over U.S. borders to have been convicted of terrorism charges in American courts.
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Kourani got into Mexico during the height of this Al Qaeda campaign, in February 2001, by paying a $3,000 bribe to an official in the Mexican consulate in Beirut, court records show. Then, on Feb. 4, 2001, a now-shuttered Tijuana-based smuggling ring that had moved hundreds of other Lebanese nationals drove him over in the trunk of a car.
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Kourani is not the only convicted Hezbollah terrorist smuggled from Latin America. Three of nine Charlotte, N.C. Lebanese nationals convicted in 2005 of operating a multi-million dollar cigarette smuggling operation for Hezbollah were smuggled by air into the country from Venezuela on bogus passports, according to the FBI.
According to unearthed intelligence reports, court records, interviews with federal agents and a variety of open sources, other border jumpers that can be publicly tied to terrorism since Al-Qaeda began its international bombing campaign against American targets in the mid-1990s are:
(read the list and anyone wanting to get a better picture of what is actually going on should read that whole link)
She said the document was a Border Patrol report about meetings in Spain between members of Al Qaeda and a Columbia guerilla group. A topic of discussion at the meeting, Kephart said, was the use of Mexican Islamist converts to infiltrate the U.S. across the southwest border.
If you want to conduct another operation after 9-11 you don't want people to know who you are, she said. And the best way to be anonymous is to come across the border.