EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – A Lebanese man who earlier this month told federal officials he came to the United States to make a bomb now says he was “only joking.”
U.S. Border Patrol agents on March 9 apprehended Basel Bassel Ebbadi after crossing the border illegally from Mexico about 4 miles from the Bridge of the Americas port of entry in El Paso. The 22-year-old man was taken to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility where he allegedly told immigration officers that he was a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah.
Ebbadi claimed Hezbollah recruited him at age 7 and that he received seven years of training and four years of advanced training in which he was taught to “kill people who were not Muslim.” According to a federal complaint filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, he also claimed he “was here to make …