Photo: AP

A security guard at Washington, DC’s Dulles International Airport has been placed on administrative leave after a CNN investigation identified him as an accused war criminal. Colonel Yusuf Abdi Ali was head of the Somali army’s Fifth Brigade under the dictator Siad Barre, and is accused of overseeing torture and mass executions during Somalia’s brutal civil war in the 1980s.

After the Barre regime collapsed in 1991, Ali traveled to Canada but was deported after the CBC aired a documentary about his alleged war crimes. “He tied [my brother] to military vehicle and dragged him behind. He said to us if you’ve got enough power, get him back,” one witness claimed. “He shredded him into pieces. That’s how he died.”

CJA/The Guardian

The colonel came to the U.S. on a visa acquired through his wife, Intisar Farah, who became a naturalized citizen. In 2006, Farah was found guilty of naturalization fraud, CNN reports. She’d claimed to be a refugee from the Somali clan Ali is accused of torturing.

Ali is one of more than 1,000 accused war criminals living and working in the United States, according to the the California-based human rights group Center for Justice and Accountability. The CJA has been pursuing litigation against Ali since 2004 on behalf of one of his alleged victims, Farhan Warfaa.

In February, an appeals court denied Ali immunity, allowing the torture and attempted murder lawsuit to proceed; however, it dismissed the elements of the suit accusing Ali of war crimes. From the Guardian:

The CJA presented its arguments at a hearing in September, during which the judges were presented with evidence that Ali shot Warfaa five times at close range during an interrogation over the theft of a water tanker. Assuming Warfaa was dead, the lawsuit stated, Ali ordered henchmen to dispose of his body. Instead he was smuggled to safety.

Ali’s brigade continued to terrorise the Isaaq clans of the separatist province of Somaliland until Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.

In dismissing the war crimes element of the CJA lawsuit, the judges sided with a US supreme court ruling in a separate case, Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum, in which justices ruled the corporate defendant had no significant contact with the US and therefore did not “touch and concern” the country sufficiently for action under the ATS.

But on the issue of individual immunity, the panel appeared to support the ruling in another CJA case, involving Muhammad Ali Samantar, a member of Siad Barre’s revolutionary council. The panel determined that having held a government office did not provide alleged perpetrators of human rights crimes with a shield from prosecution, allowing Warfaa’s claims to continue under the Torture Victim Protection Act.

“The decision appears to reverse more than three decades of legal precedent that has allowed victims of human rights abuses to bring lawsuits against the worst international human rights criminals, when they are found in this country, for mass atrocities committed abroad,” CJA lawyer Kathy Roberts said at the time.

“We welcome today’s ruling that Colonel Ali must face justice for his crimes in court but we respectfully disagree with the panel’s decision to dismiss the mass atrocity claims. The attacks on Mr Warfaa were not isolated. They were part of a systematic and widespread attack on civilians. Colonel Ali should be held to account for all of his crimes.”

Now, Ali works for the private security firm Master Security, which has a contract with the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. Although he had passed a “full, federally mandated vetting process,” CNN reports, his employer was “unaware of the pending litigation.” The company is reviewing the case, Chief Executive Rick Cucina said, and Ali’s airport access has been withdrawn.

Ali’s lawyer said that there ought to be no concern over his working at an airport; Roberts disagrees. “It’s very deeply disturbing, in part because that is a position of trust,” the CJA lawyer said. “He abused that authority terribly in Somalia, and while I don’t imagine that he’s committing these same kinds of crimes at Dulles airport, I think it’s very disconcerting.”

Joseph Peter Drennan, Ali’s attorney, denies all the charges against his client. “How dare anyone call him a war criminal,” Drennan told CNN. “Those are just allegations. If he is indeed a war criminal, take him to The Hague. Or if he is a war criminal, take it up with the immigration authorities. Don’t sue him in an American court...My client deserves to live in the U.S. just as any other legal permanent resident.”

Outside his apartment, Ali told a CNN correspondent, “To tell you the truth, all is false. Baseless.”