March 25, 2002	Monday	Muharram 10, 1423

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)

WASHINGTON, March 24: US Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Sunday he had ordered a “very substantial” investigation at the embattled immigration agency and reassigned one official as authorities searched for four Pakistanis who disappeared after arriving in the United States on visa waivers.

With the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) already under fire over student visa approvals for two of the Sept 11 hijackers, Ashcroft said he found the new cases of wrongful visas maddening and hinted legislative changes other than the administrative overhaul now pending on Capitol Hill might be in order.

“I tell you, what’s happened in the INS is enough to drive a man to drink,” Ashcroft told “Fox News Sunday”.

“I believe we will find these individuals, and I believe we will be able to correct this situation,” he added. “But it’s part of the need to renovate the INS.”

Ashcroft declined to comment on the status of the search for the four Pakistanis, who arrived on March 16 in Norfolk, Virginia, on a Russian ship and did not return to the vessel when it departed for Savannah, Georgia.

He said the four had been wrongly granted visa waivers by the INS.

“We have launched a very substantial investigation,” he said. “I believe that these visas were granted in a way which violated the regulations, that appropriate precautions were not taken.”

Although US officials have said none of the four had been linked to any “terrorist or criminal-related” activities, Ashcroft said one official had been reassigned pending the outcome of the investigation.

He did not elaborate, but other officials said an INS official in Norfolk entered the wrong birth date for one of the four Pakistanis, and if the right date had been entered the INS would have learned the Pakistani had an immigration violation in Chicago from several years ago.

“This is one of the maddening parts about this,” Ashcroft said, “....And there may well need to be legislative changes.”

The agency, which is responsible for screening individuals who want to enter the United States and watching about 250 ports of entry, drew widespread criticism for an earlier blunder involving the visas for the hijackers.

On March 13, six months after the Sept 11 attacks, the Florida flight school where two of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, were trained, received notification from the INS their student visas had been approved. Three of the 19 hijackers also had overstayed their visas.

Ashcroft said INS Commissioner James Ziglar would remain in charge of the agency he took over in August last year, shortly before the attacks.

While Ashcroft admitted that “none of our jobs are safe”, he said, “We have got to bring the INS into a place where it works effectively and it’s his job to do that and yes, he is doing that.”

Ziglar has proposed putting all INS services under one agency and splitting the organization into two divisions — enforcement and service. More than 250 million citizens and non-citizens enter and exit the United States each year, and as many as eight million are in the country illegally.—Reuters