Two weeks ago we learned that Iraqis lied about their military “careers” in Iraq, here, and now it’s a Bosnian in Roanoke.
From WSLS-10:
ROANOKE, VA –A former guard at the Rabic camp in Derventa Municipality of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who allegedly committed abuses against Serb civilians being detained at the camp, has been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury sitting in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia on charges related to an unlawful Application for Naturalization.
In an indicted returned under seal on June 9, 2011 and unsealed this afternoon following his initial court appearance, the grand jury has charged Almaz Nezirovic, 52, of Roanoke, Va., with one count of submitting an unlawful application for naturalization and one count of making a false statement at a naturalization interview. If convicted, the maximum penalty faced by the defendant is ten years incarceration on count one and five years incarceration on count two.
According to the indictment, between June 1992 and December 1995 the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina was in a state of war. During that war, the defendant, Nezirovic, was a member of the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) where he served as a guard at the Rabic camp, which detained Serb citizens. While serving as a guard, Nezirovic is alleged to have beat and inhumanely treated ZS, ZL, ML and other Serb citizens.
When making an application to seek admission into the United States as a refugee in 1997, Nezirovic failed to disclose that, while serving with the HVO, he assaulted and inhumanely treated Serb civilians, facts that would have likely prevented the defendant from being granted refugee status into the United States. On or about August 11, 1997, Nezirovic entered the United States as a refugee.
Read it all.
Heck, you can’t blame the State Department, they were really really busy that year bringing in 21,375 “refugees” (mostly Muslim) from Bill Clinton’s Bosnian War (see the stats from the 1997 Annual Report to Congress, here). So you couldn’t have expected them to have weeded out every criminal, could you?
We’ve written a lot about refugee resettlement in Roanoke so just type ‘Roanoke’ into our search function, but here is one post about refugees convicted of attempting to kidnap wives of important people in the city that you shouldn’t miss.