Hatching of terrorism hoaxes said to be on rise

The tips were frightening and very specific: Six people smuggled in from Mexico were seeking nuclear material for an attack on Boston; a Canadian Al Qaeda cell planned to bomb a Los Angeles shopping mall; a terrorist sought to blow up a New Jersey bridge.

Each one set off intensive and costly investigations. Each one caused some measure of public alarm. But each one, according to authorities, turned out to being nothing more than a tipster inventing a terrorist threat to get revenge on an adversary.

The allegation last week that a 34-year-old Mexican man named Jose Ernesto Beltran Quinonez made up the Boston threat to get back at associates in a smuggling ring highlighted what's become a major problem for law enforcement agencies: the cooking up of fake terrorism plots for retribution.

''It's new in the terrorism context that people are using more extreme types of hoaxes to get revenge," said Bryan Sierra, a spokesman for the US Department of Justice in Washington. ''They're exploiting the concerns of a terrorist attack."

The people behind such false claims are a varied bunch: the jilted lover, the motorist angered by a car accident, the vindictive mother, and the boyfriend cheated out of money.

Falsely accusing someone of a crime out of a vendetta is hardly new. But Sierra said it appears to be a new phenomenon since Sept. 11, 2001, that people are making up large-scale terrorist plots ''simply for getting somebody back."

Officials at the Justice Department and the FBI said they don't compile statistics on the number of false terrorism claims born out of grudges, but there have been a number of such cases throughout the country, including many that are resolved without ever being made public.

In one case locally, an anonymous letter was sent to Boston's Joint Terrorism Task Force in June 2003 accusing two Pakistani men in the Worcester area of being Al Qaeda operatives, according to Assistant US Attorney Michael D. Ricciuti, chief of the terrorism and national security unit in the US attorney's office in Massachusetts.

Investigators determined that the charges were false, but one of the men was embroiled in a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife, Radica Taufeeque, Ricciuti said. Taufeeque was investigated but never charged with making the false report, though she pleaded guilty to separate immigration violations.

And federal prosecutors in Boston are currently investigating two cases in which people told the FBI about what Ricciuti said were ''serious acts of terrorism that turned out not to be true." He declined to elaborate because they're pending cases.

Last summer, after a Mexican man was involved in a car crash in San Diego, he contacted the FBI and accused the other driver of being a terrorist planning an attack at the Mexican border. The tipster was convicted of making a false statement to the FBI and sentenced to a year in jail.

A Canadian man admitted that after his ex-girlfriend refused to pay him back $4,000, he called in a false tip to the Department of Homeland Security last April alleging that she and three of her friends were members of an Al Qaeda cell and were planning to bomb a West Los Angeles shopping mall. The man is awaiting sentencing next month.

And in New Jersey, an undocumented Mexican immigrant admitted that after discovering that his wife was having an affair, he e-mailed police and claimed that the other man, who was from Uruguay, was a terrorist planning to bomb a bridge. The tipster was sentenced to six months in prison last year and ordered deported.

Joe Parris, a supervisory special agent for the FBI in Washington, said that every time someone intentionally provides false information it pulls investigators away from real threats.

''Each instance of this is a problem," Paris said. ''It is tying up resources and alarming the public."

It's hard to say how much time and money Massachusetts spent in response to Beltran's claim on Jan. 17 that four Chinese nationals and two Iraqis were planning an attack on Boston, said Katie Ford, a spokeswoman for the state Executive Office of Public Safety.

But Ford said an emergency bunker, staffed around-the-clock by nine public safety and law enforcement agencies, ran from Jan. 19 until Jan. 21. She said officials were more concerned about the impact the false alarm had on the public.

''Every time one of these threats turn out to be a hoax and information is out in the public domain, that is potentially a count against us in the whole crying wolves category," said Ford.

Concerns about the impact that such false reports have on law enforcement and the public prompted Congress to increase the penalties for hoaxes in the National Intelligence Reform Act, which was signed into law last month.

But Ricciuti stressed that authorities don't want to discourage people from calling in tips, and that the public won't get in trouble just for calling in something that doesn't pan out.