The US federal government has accused the owner of an Arabic newspaper published in Chicago of using his post to spy on Iraqi opposition leaders for ousted leader Saddam Hussein's intelligence service.
60-year-old Khaled Dumeisi, according to a report, even provided Iraqi intelligence agents with bogus press credentials that could help them evade travel restrictions, federal prosecutors said Wednesday in announcing Dumeisi's arrest.
"He wrote provocative stories to sort of goad people into responding to him and then he took the tapes and sent them over to the Iraqi government," US Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald was cited by AP as saying.
Dumeisi was charged based partly on a dossier seized in a Baghdad safe-house back in April as US occupation troops moved in and Saddam's regime was crumbling, according to prosecutors.
Finding the dossier capped an FBI investigation of Dumeisi going back at least four years that drew on interviews with informants, including a former Iraqi intelligence officer, federal officials said.
The dossier detailed the activities of an agent code-named "Sirhan," which prosecutors allege was Dumeisi's code name.
Papers filed in US District Court in Chicago said Dumeisi had even boasted to one of the FBI's informants that he had traveled to Baghdad in 1997 or 1998 for training on how to gather information.
After returning, he interviewed an Iraqi opposition leader using a pen that contained a hidden camera and microphone, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the complaint.
It said an acquaintance told Dumeisi she was romantically involved with a man who someday might become president of Iraq. The woman provided Dumeisi with phone numbers her friend had called, the affidavit said.
Furthermore, it said Dumeisi forwarded the phone numbers along with bank records to agents in the Iraqi mission to the United Nations (UN).
Dumeisi maintained contact with a number of Iraqi intelligence agents in the UN mission, one of whom was expelled as a spy, officials said.
Dumeisi appeared before US Magistrate Judge Edward A. Bobrick who scheduled a July 17 bond hearing. Until then, Dumeisi will be held in the government's Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Defense attorney James Fennerty, for his part, told reporters afterward that neither he nor Dumeisi had read the complaint but added, "He doesn't believe that he has done anything wrong."
Dumeisi, head of a company that publishes the Arabic Al-Majhar newspaper, has been in the US for a decade as an unregistered alien and lives in a Chicago suburb. (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
