Liberia national Mohammed Jabbateh, a ruthless Liberian warlord also known as “Jungle Jabbah”, managed to enter the United States and live in hiding for years in East Lansdowne, Pa. He married, started a family, and launched a shipping business, winning asylum from the U.S. government and, eventually, permanent residence, according to the Washington Post, but managed to evade federal investigation until 2013 and was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2018. During the height of Liberia’s first civil war from 1992 to 1995, Jabbateh, while serving as commander of a warring faction known as the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), committed various acts of “shocking brutality including rapes, sexual enslavement, slave labor, murder, mutilation and ritual cannibalism. He also used children as soldiers,” according to a Department of Justice press release, and was known to order the hearts cut from live victims whose relatives were forced to cook and eat them.
“This defendant committed acts of such violence and depravity that they are almost beyond belief,” said U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain. “This man is responsible for atrocities that will ripple for generations in Liberia.
Court records show key vetting failures occurred in the late 1990s, before the post-9/11 security screening reforms, when Jabbateh withheld information about who he really was in a 1998 asylum application that allowed him to enter the United States. He was granted asylum after screening in 1999, again lying on the forms about his wartime activities. However, from 2002 through 2011, after reforms, U.S. immigration authorities failed to learn who Jabbateh really was despite years of potential opportunities.
In 2002, Jabbateh sought to adjust his status from asylee to lawful permanent residence, and filed an application in which he again covered up his wartime militia involvement. For reasons unknown, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewers did not interview Jabatteh as part of his LPR application screening for almost a decade, in 2011, leaving him to prosper in business and enjoy raising five U.S.-born children. That is the post-9/11-reforms failure.
According to the war-crimes news website Global Geneva, “it was an open secret in the intelligence community that Liberian war criminals were living under their real identities in west Philadelphia.”
It’s unclear whether Jabatteh ever got his LPR status, but it doesn’t matter because federal authorities did not mount an investigation of him until 2013, the Washington Post reported. He was not arrested or charged until three more years after that, in 2016. The timeline shows he enjoyed freedom inside the United States from the time he applied for LPR in 2002, through his immigration screening interview in 2011 and until his arrest in 2016.
This time lapse likely had no connection to suspicions or tips that Jabatteh was a war criminal because, again, federal investigators did not mount an investigation until 2013, according to the Washington Post.
On April 19, 2018, a federal judge sentenced Jabatteh to 30 years in prison on several counts of immigration fraud, the longest sentence ever imposed for that crime.