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Texas man jailed for Hezbollah past

Wissam 'Sam' Allouche gets five years in prison for failing to tell US about his past life as a member of Hezbollah when he applied for citizenship.

A US has sentenced a Lebanese man living in Texas to five years in prison for lying to US authorities on his citizenship application and purposefully failing to reveal his ties with two armed Lebanese movements, including Hezbollah.

 

 

Wissam "Sam" Allouche, 45, was arrested by the FBI and the Texas anti-terror task force in 2013 after his ex-wife - a US army soldier – and her father informed the authroties of his past. At the time, reports said he told them he had killed an Israeli pilot when he was a member of the Amal militia and Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s.

 

Pro-Hezbollah rally in Beirut
Pro-Hezbollah rally in Beirut

 

Allouche's case has garnered some local media attention due to the fact that for some time he served as a contractor for the US military, serving as a translator in Iraq.

 

At the time of his conviction, in February 2015, Allouche was also charged with not disclosing his ties to the terror groups when he applied for security clearance with the US Defense Department for the contracting job, according to the report by the San Antonio Express.

 

Prior to 2009, Allouche worked for a private company, L-3 Communications, which provides linguistic services for the US military. Allouche was deployed to Iraq for several months as part of his role in the company.

 

Allouche has lived in the US since 2002, after he married an army officer in Germany, Jennifer R. Allouche, who reportedly helped get Allouche the job at L-3 Communications.

 

The two met in 1999 and were divorced 14 years later in 2009 – a few months after Allouche became a naturalized US citizen.

 

Allouche's ex-wife and family claim that Allouche told the family that he had served time in Israeli jail and pummeled to death an Israeli pilot. The family's allegations caused counter-terrorism agents to launch a probe into the allegations in 2009, and Allouche was put on the terror watch list.

 

A joint terrorism task force has been investigating Allouche for more than three years, using an undercover agent to record conversations with him, according to authorities. The FBI raided his then-home in Universal City in 2011, and said they found documents he had fabricated to show he had security clearances, membership in US Special Forces and Defense Department intelligence units, according to the report by the San Antonio Express.

 


פרסום ראשון: 04.29.15, 09:58
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