Al-Qaida suspect arrested in Oklahoma
WASHINGTON — A Saudi immigrant suspected of once applying to join al-Qaida’s most notorious training camp was arrested on a charge of visa fraud in Oklahoma, where he had been living for years with his family, federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The FBI discovered the man, Naif Abdulaziz Alfallaj, only recently, when authorities matched his fingerprints to those taken from a document captured in Afghanistan, officials said. The document was an application for the Farooq camp, where four of the Sept. 11 hijackers trained.
He apparently filled out the application in 2000, when he was about 17, officials said, well after al-Qaida had made its intentions of attacking the United States and its allies known to the world. Anyone who tried to join the camp would have known that al-Qaida was a terrorist organization, law enforcement officials said.
Alfallaj, 35, obtained his pilot’s license in 2016, according to public records and U.S. officials. Noncitizens are required to submit fingerprints as part of the licensing process.
Alfallaj came to the United States in about 2011 on a nonimmigrant visa and had been living in Weatherford, Okla., about 70 miles west of Oklahoma City, U.S. officials said. The FBI had been watching him for about five months and had been trying to determine whether Alfallaj was involved in terrorist activity in the United States. The FBI declined to comment, and little else was known about him.
The case highlights the difficulty facing the government in processing the large amounts of fingerprints, photographs, messages, email addresses, phone numbers and DNA samples that have been collected in nearly two decades of war.
Many documents and electronic media collected in Afghanistan land on the shelves of a unit in the FBI’s counterterrorism division. The materials, which are stored in federal facilities in northern Virginia and at FBI headquarters in Washington, have been a vexing problem for the agency. U.S. officials have long wanted to exploit the materials but lacked the resources as the FBI has focused on other pressing terrorism investigations over the years.
The case of Alfallaj is similar to one brought in 2011 against two Iraqi men who were arrested in Bowling Green, Ky., after they had entered the United States. The FBI discovered the men after finding fingerprints on explosive devices that had been used to attack U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The two men were later convicted of terrorism charges and sentenced to life in prison.
After the men were discovered, the FBI deployed hundreds of people to pull fingerprints off of improvised explosive devices stored at the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center, known around the bureau as the Bomb Library of America. Officials said a similar effort is underway to make sure other materials similar to the training camp application are examined.
At some point, the FBI decided to go through the terrorist camp applications to determine whether any fingerprints could be identified as part of a renewed effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, law enforcement officials said.
Alfallaj should never had been able to enter the country, said James McJunkin, the former head of counterterrorism at the FBI.
“I’d say there was a number of breakdowns going back to where the original intelligence was maintained and stored,” McJunkin said. “He should have been on a watch list.”