Conspirator in smuggling ring gets 5yrs in prison

News agencies in the U.S. are reporting tonight that a Ghanaian man connected to a smuggling ring in Belize has been convicted of smuggling East Africans to the United States. On Thursday, twenty-seven year old Mohammed Kamel Ibrahim AKA Hakim, a native of Ghana and naturalized citizen of Mexico, was sentenced to five years in prison by U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina after pleading guilty to one count of Conspiracy and three counts of taking illegal persons to the United States for profit. Ibrahim operated a smuggling organization in Mexico City that moved unauthorized nationals from East Africa across the southern U.S. border. In plea documents Ibrahim admitted that between June 2006 and February 2007 he and co-defendant Sampson Lovelace Boateng conspired to smuggle numerous persons by providing them with fraudulent Mexican visas. Boateng obtained the visas through a former employee of the Mexican embassy in Belize, his wife forty-nine year old Irma Valencia. The smugglers concealed people for more than twelve hours in the sleeper compartments of commercial buses. Ibrahim admitted to smuggling between twenty-five and ninety-nine persons into the United States.

Ibrahim and Boateng were charged in a twenty-eight-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia on October thirty-first, 2007. Boateng was arrested at the Miami International Airport on November fifth, 2007, after arriving on a commercial airline flight from Belize. Boateng’s sentencing is scheduled for February twenty-second, 2009. The investigation was conducted by I.C.E.’s Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., offices, with assistance from the Diplomatic Security Office of the U.S. Embassy in Belize and the Drug Enforcement Administration attache in Belize.