Two Cubans who worked at the Havana embassy in Kenya were identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the U.S. court records of a scheme to smuggle 268 Somalis to Cuba and on to the United States.
The case of convicted alien smuggler Anthony J. Tracy raised national security concerns because of his contacts with a Somali terror group, Al Shabab. Tracy denied helping Shabab, but failed that part of a lie-detector test.
"I helped a lot of Somalis and most are good, but there are some who are bad and I leave them to ALLAH," Tracy wrote in a Jan. 15 e-mail, according to court records in his case.
The two Cubans, identified only as Consuelo and Elena, were fired by their supervisors for providing the Somalis with visas so they could slip into the United States via Dubai, Moscow, Havana, South America and Mexico, the records showed.
Tracy, 35, a Virginia resident, pleaded guilty to one charge of alien smuggling and was sentenced last week to time served -- four months -- and a $100 fine in federal court in Alexandria, Va.
Many of the court records were sealed or heavily redacted. But others showed that while Tracy confessed to helping Somalis obtain Cuba visas, prosecutors acknowledged they were having trouble proving that any of the aliens had reached the United States.
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