Dozens of suspected terrorists may have been mistakenly allowed to enter the U.S. as war refugees, FBI agents, who are investigating roadside bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, have warned.
The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Kentucky, who later admitted in court that they'd attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq, prompted the bureau to investigate the matter.
According to ABC News, the bureau assigned hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists' fingerprints.
FBI Agent Gregory Carl, director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center (TEDAC), said that the country was currently supporting dozens of current counter-terrorism investigations like that.
The revelation was made by Carl in an interview on ABC News' 'World News with Diane Sawyer' and 'Nightline'.
House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said that he would not be surprised if there were many more, adding that these are trained terrorists in the art of bomb making that are inside the United States.
More From This Section
As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department stopped processing Iraq refugees for six months in 2011, federal officials told ABC News.
According to the repot, one Iraqi who had aided American troops was assassinated before his refugee application could be processed, because of the immigration delays, two U.S. officials said.
In 2011, fewer than 10,000 Iraqis were resettled as refugees in the U.S., half the number from the year before, State Department statistics show, the report added.
