Ethiopian Citizen Kefelegn Alemu Worku entered the United States and settled in Colorado in November 2004 on a family refugee status claim established in Kenya. In November 2006, he applied for lawful permanent residence and received it in 2008, then applied for U.S. citizenship on November 22, 2009, which he received in under 13 weeks.
But the false name the Ethiopian successfully submitted on all three applications – Habteab Berhe Temanu – covered up the fact that, eight years earlier, Ethiopia had publicly convicted him of genocide and sentenced him to death in absentia for torturing to death at least 101 and as many as 150 people during the 1977-80 “Red Terror” campaign, which was a ruthless political purge targeting those suspected of opposing the Marxist regime of the time.
Worku committed these crimes while working as a prison guard at the notorious Higher 15 detention camp during the purge years. Later witness testimony had Worku conducting beatings and torture sessions using a cattle prod, rifle butts, whips and pipes, burning newspapers, and cigarettes, and shot dead both adults and children, court records show. One witness testified, for instance, that the “bloodthirsty monster”, after executing several prisoners, ordered other prisoners to drink the shed blood and lick the blood clean with their tongues.
Ethiopia’s 2000 prosecution could have made his face and name publicly knowable and potentially discoverable in three separate security vettings, but so too could his initial identity fraud.
U.S. government agencies missed three opportunities to discover Worku, two of them from 2008 onward. After fleeing Ethiopia, Worku lived in Kenya for 13 years. In about early 2004, he slotted himself into the identity of an Ethiopian father of five who was dying as he and his family in Kenya were about to be granted provisional refugee status and admittance to the United States.
At the invitation of the ill man’s wife and older children, Worku then falsely claimed parenthood of the four children to ensure the application would go through. Worku has denied committing the atrocities but admitted that he slotted himself into the refugee family at the behest of the man who eventually did die the following year, in 2005.
“The father of the kids that I brought here…[he} was sick and on his death bed. He entreated me to take his kids to the United States because he didn’t want his kids to miss that opportunity of coming to the United States,” Worku told a judge during a hearing in Denver.
USCIS refugee affairs personnel on the ground potentially could have uncovered the fraud by checking with the Ethiopian government for wanted convicted war crimes fugitives, or merely by interviewing the family members individually at length for discrepancies and comparing their testimony against Worku’s personal history during his long years living in Kenya.
He lived for years as a Denver-area parking attendant before a former victim in May 2011 recognized him by chance in a local café and tipped off federal ICE Homeland Security Investigations. After his Colorado discovery, an ICE investigator easily coaxed from all of the children that Woku was an “imposter”, court records show.
On July 12, 2004, however, he entered the United States with the man’s wife and five children.
A second chance for the U.S. government to discover this fraud came came and went in 2008, when the USCIS granted Worku lawful permanent residence. A third opportunity was lost after Worku applied for U.S. citizenship on November 22, 2009 and was granted it on March 2, 2010.
USCIS granted these benefits despite the Ethiopian court’s 2000 conviction.
In May 2011, Homeland Security Investigations received information from an informant who was a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Ethiopia. The informant was a former prisoner of Higher 15 who recognized Worku at the Cozy Cafe in Aurora, Colorado.
On October 11, 2013, a federal jury convicted Worku for unlawfully procuring citizenship or naturalization, aggravated identity theft, and fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other documents. In May 2014, a federal judge sentenced him to 22 years in federal prison and revoked his U.S. citizenship.