5-year sentence for Africa-to-US smuggler

WASHINGTON: A Ghanaian man was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday after pleading guilty to smuggling East African economic refugees into the United States via Latin America.
Mohammed Kamel Ibrahim, 27, was known as "Silk the Shocker" when he lived in Mexico in 2007 operating what U.S. government officials said was a major smuggling pipeline.
The case raised alarms among intelligence officials focused on networks that smuggle people from Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan. U.S. officials say al-Qaida and other terrorists live in most of those areas.
In intercepted e-mails, Ibrahim wrote that "getting into the U.S. is no problem at all" and could be done for $5,000.
According to court documents, the smugglers had associates in Africa, typically corrupt officials, and they chose their routes based on which transit points employed easily bribed authorities.more..http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/23/america/NA-US-Smuggling-Sentence.php