2 Iraqis held trying to cross Mexico border

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Two Iraqis who paid alien smugglers in Mexico to help them gain illegal entry to the United States were arrested yesterday by Mexican authorities in a border town near San Diego.

The Mexican Attorney General's Office said Samir Yousif Shana and Munir Yousif Shana were taken into custody by Mexican federal agents, along with two suspected alien smugglers, in the Paso del Aguila district of Tecate, some 30 miles east of San Diego.

The Iraqis, according to a statement, had made contact with the smugglers in Tijuana, located south of San Diego, who then accompanied them by bus to Tecate.

Mexican authorities said investigators were told the Iraqis had been advised by an unidentified person in Baghdad that he could arrange for them to be smuggled across the U.S. border once they got to Mexico.

The Baghdad smuggler demonstrates that the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border is becoming "common knowledge" on the Arab street, one U.S. law-enforcement official said yesterday.

U.S. national security officials have fretted often in the past about the Mexican border being an attractive conduit for Islamic terrorists.

The statement from the Mexican Attorney General's Office said the Iraqis have family members who live in the San Diego area.

A spokesman for the attorney general's office said the two men had no known connection to terrorists and, at this point, faced "absolutely nothing more than charges of being unable to prove they were in Mexican territory legally."

The U.S. Border Patrol has reported a rise in the number of foreign nationals from countries other than Mexico now being detained along the U.S.-Mexico border, where more than 1.15 million illegal aliens were apprehended last year, although none have been identified as having ties to Islamic terrorist organizations.

But Adm. James Loy, former Department of Homeland Security deputy secretary, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February that "recent information from ongoing investigations, detentions and emerging threat streams strongly suggests that al Qaeda has considered using the southwestern border to infiltrate the United States."