ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A court in the United States sentenced an Iraqi man to over three years in prison, accusing him of leading a conspiracy to defraud the US refugee programs, said the Department of Justice in a statement on Friday.
Aws Muwafaq Abduljabbar, 44, was sentenced to 37 months in prison by a judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia after pleading guilty in January to the role he allegedly played in a scheme to cheat the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), said the department in the statement.
In addition to Abduljabbar, the conspiracy also involved Haitham Isa Saado Sad and Olesya Leonidovna Krasilova, both also aged 44, who were previously employed in US State Department offices in Jordan and Russia, respectively.
“As part of their duties, both defendants had access to the State Department’s Worldwide Refugee Admissions Processing System (WRAPS), a database containing sensitive, non-public information about refugee applicants and their family members,” read the statement.
Abduljabbar had paid Sad and Krasilova to steal records from the database, in particular those from Iraqi applicants, allowing the former to assist applicants in receiving fraudulent admission into the US.
The US in March resumed reviewing cases of Iraqis that have served alongside US service members, over a year after the program was put on hold in January 2021.
In May, Chasib Hafedh Saadoon al-Fawadi, an Iraqi who lived in New York, was sentenced to 48 months in prison after allegedly admitting to submitting false information to the US Citizenship and immigration services while applying for permanent residency in the country in 2017.
