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 News from Around the Americas | January 2005 
False Tips Cost Antiterror Officials Time and Credibility
 Shelley Murphy - The Boston Globe
 Boston - The tips were frightening and specific: Six people smuggled in from Mexico were seeking nuclear material for an attack on Boston; a Canadian Al Qaeda cell planned to bomb a Los Angeles shopping mall; a terrorist sought to blow up a New Jersey bridge.
Each one set off intensive and costly investigations. Each one caused some measure of public alarm. But each one, according to law-enforcement officials, turned out to being nothing more than a tipster inventing a terrorist threat to get revenge on an adversary.
The allegation last week that a Mexican, José Ernesto Beltrán Quiñones, made up the Boston threat to get back at associates in a smuggling ring highlighted what has become a major problem for law-enforcement agencies: the fabricating of terrorism plots for retribution.
"It's new in the terrorism context that people are using more extreme types of hoaxes to get revenge," said Bryan Sierra, a spokesman for the Department of Justice in Washington. "They're exploiting the concerns of a terrorist attack."
The people behind such false claims are a varied bunch: the jilted lover; the motorist angered by a car accident; the vindictive mother; the boyfriend cheated out of money.
Falsely accusing someone of a crime to exact revenge is hardly new. But Sierra said that what appeared to be a new since Sept. 11, 2001, was people making up large-scale terrorist plots "simply for getting somebody back."
Officials at the Justice Department and the FBI said they do not compile statistics on the number of false terrorism claims born out of grudges, but there have been a number of such cases throughout the United States, including many that were resolved without ever being made public.
In one case, an anonymous letter was sent to Boston's Joint Terrorism Task Force in June 2003, accusing two Pakistani men in Worcester, Massachusetts, of being Al Qaeda operatives, according to Michael Ricciuti, chief of the terrorism and national security unit in the U.S. attorney's office in Massachusetts.
Investigators determined that the charges were false. One of the men was embroiled in a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife, Radica Taufeeque, Ricciuti said. Taufeeque was investigated but never charged with making the false report, although she pleaded guilty to separate immigration violations.
Last summer, after a Mexican man was involved in a car crash in San Diego, he contacted the FBI and accused the other driver of being a terrorist planning an attack at the Mexican border. The tipster was convicted of making a false statement to the FBI and sentenced to a year in prison.
A Canadian man admitted that after his ex-girlfriend had refused to pay him back $4,000, he called in a false tip to the Department of Homeland Security in April, alleging that she and three of her friends were members of a Qaeda cell and were planning to bomb a West Los Angeles shopping mall. The man is awaiting sentencing next month.
In New Jersey, an illegal Mexican immigrant admitted that after discovering that his wife was having an affair, he e-mailed the police and claimed that her lover, who was from Uruguay, was a terrorist planning to bomb a bridge. He was sentenced to six months in prison last year and ordered deported.
Joe Parris, a supervisory special agent for the FBI in Washington, said that every time someone intentionally provides false information it pulls investigators away from real threats.
"Each instance of this is a problem," Paris said. "It is tying up resources and alarming the public."
After Beltrán claimed on Jan. 17 that four Chinese nationals and two Iraqis were planning an attack on Boston, an emergency bunker staffed around-the-clock by nine public-safety and law-enforcement agencies was set up, said Katie Ford, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety. But she said what most concerned officials was the effect that the false alarm had had on the public.
"Every time one of these threats turns out to be a hoax and information is out in the public domain, that is potentially a count against us in the whole crying-wolves category," Ford said.
Concerns about the impact that false reports have on law enforcement and the public prompted congress to increase the penalties for hoaxes in the National Intelligence Reform Act, which was signed into law last month. |
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