In 2013, Ethiopian nationals Mohamed Abdirahman Osman and his wife, Zeinab Abdirahman Mohamad, applied for refugee status at the American embassy in Beijing, China, a city to which they had themselves smuggled from refugee centers in Kenya. In Beijing, the couple found purchase in telling the American embassy that the U.S.-designated terrorist group al-Shabaab had kidnapped the couple and held them hostage in an abandoned milk factory and that he lost his hands and suffered a ruined eye as a victim in an al-Shabaab terror attack. They swore to American adjudicators they were Somalis and were fleeing terrorism and war.
USCIS reviewers granted them refugee status and in February 2014 they settled in Tucson, Ariz. After the requisite one year of provisional residency for refugees, in 2015 they hewed to the same stories when they applied for their lawful permanent residence green cards, which they received after a second security vetting.
But an FBI investigation three years later discovered that almost no parts of the stories Mohamed and Zeinab told were true, including even the names they provided (Mustaf Adan Arale was Mohamed’s true name, for instance). According to an August 2018 indictment, the lies covered up that he was actually an Ethiopian who would have been in limited danger in his home country. It seems likely they chose Somalia as a nationality because, due to two decades of anarchy, that country would hold no records that could be checked whereas Ethiopia does.
Security reviewers missed far more than the basic lies about nationality and identity.
The FBI found that Mohamed was an operative of the U.S.-designated terrorist group al-Shabaab that, in their fake persecution stories, supposedly had attacked the couple and their families. In fact, Mohamed blew his hands off and wrecked vision in one eye by mishandling explosives for the terrorist group. Thanks to the fake identities and nationalities, screeners in Beijing and later in Arizona also missed that Mohamed’s brother was an active operative for the terrorist group; and that the couple’s friends and associates are also members of the terrorist group. Zeinab attested on federal papers and in apparently unchallenged USCIS interviews that her husband was someone else from a different country to help cover it all up.
Their story did not begin to unravel until a March 24, 2017, FBI search warrant on the couple’s home yielded certain unspecified "items of property", according to court records. Mohamed told the agents he was worried about the investigation and that he had lied to agents.
Perhaps had adjudicators in Beijing found out the identity and nationality lies they, too, would have secured the same admissions that FBI agents did later: that al-Shabaab had recruited Mohamed in his native Ethiopia and sent him to the Somali capital of Mogadishu to serve with other members of the terrorist group. They apparently kept Mohamed busy. In explaining an injury clearly caused by explosive ordinance, Mohamed told USCIS in Tucson that he had been injured in a June 2010 al-Shabaab attack at the Bakara Market in central Mogadishu. News reports he could easily have pulled up on the Internet showed there was such an attack in May 2010 that killed 45 civilians.
But Mohamed admitted to the FBI that he lost his hands in 2009 while handling explosives for al-Shabaab.
Indeed, the couple and their extended families all had been enmeshed with al-Shabaab, rather than fleeing the group's wrath as they falsely claimed to American embassy officials and later to U.S. immigration authorities as they applied for citizenship. He and Zeinab omitted the fact that he sent as much as $32,000 to family still active in al-Shabaab, including to a brother after the brother fled as a fugitive following his conviction, along with an uncle and aunt, for carrying out a deadly May 24, 2014, restaurant bombing in Djibouti.
In April 2020, Zeinab and Mohamed pleaded guilty to false swearing on their applications and lying to federal agents at the American embassy in China and, in 2015, on permanent residency applications in Arizona. Both were deported to Jordan.