The Philippine authorities said on Tuesday that they were deporting two American brothers arrested for suspected links to terrorism. One of the men worked until 2000 for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the laboratory said.
A spokesman for the laboratory, a major nuclear weapons facility near San Francisco, said that the FBI had been examining whether the former employee, Michael Ray Stubbs, 55, had access to sensitive information there in the course of his work as a heating and air conditioning technician.
An FBI agent in San Francisco, Chris McDonough, said that the bureau was "assisting in the investigation" by the Philippine authorities but "does not have any charges pending" against either Stubbs or his brother, Jamil Daoud Mujahid, 56, a convert to Islam. The two men were arrested on Dec. 13 in the town of Tanza in Cavite province, 34km southwest of Manila, according to the Philippine bureau of immigration.
Philippine officials said that Mujahid, also known as James Stubbs, had met with members of the Abu Sayyaf Muslim extremist group, as well as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front separatist movement, two groups loosely linked by Philippine officials to al-Qaeda.
Both men denied any wrongdoing when they appeared in handcuffs at a news conference in Manila on Tuesday. But a Philippine official said that the US government was concerned that Michael Ray Stubbs may have passed sensitive information from Lawrence Livermore to his brother, who might have shared it with the militant groups.
The brothers, both of whom carried tourist visas, are being deported to the US as "undesirable aliens," the Philippine immigration commissioner, Andrea Domingo, said on Tuesday.
It was not immediately clear when the men would be returned to the US, and whether they would face arrest in this country. The State Department referred questions about the details of the deportation to Philippine authorities, but the Philippine Embassy in Washington said it had no information about their return.
Susan Houghton, a spokesman for the Livermore lab, said that Michael Ray Stubbs' security clearance there had been terminated as a routine matter in July 2000, four months after he left his job on a medical leave.
"We are aware of what the Philippines officials did," Houghton said. "We have been working closely with the FBI on this issue since he was arrested in the Philippines a few weeks ago."
The Philippine immigration bureau has described the Stubbs brothers as "diehard Muslim extremists" who were "seen meeting with known leaders of various terrorist cells" with links to al-Qaeda. Philippine officials have described Mujahid as a man who left a job as a teacher in California to study Arabic in the Sudan.
The Philippine authorities said that the brothers, born in Missouri, had been under surveillance before their arrest. Domingo, the immigration commissioner, said there was no evidence linking the two men to any past or planned terrorist operations, but she said that in his statements to local authorities, Mujahid had called for the overthrow of the American government.
Domingo said the two men carried documents indicating that they were soliciting funds for the construction of Muslim schools and mosques.
Mujahid interrupted the news conference to denounce the accusations against him and his brother as "fabricated lies." Mujahid said he had a Filipino wife and was in the Philippines because she was pregnant.
Domingo was quoted as saying that the two men were "violating immigration laws and they're being charged and they are going through immigration proceedings."
The US Embassy in the Philippines has declined to comment on the allegations, except to say that the brothers had retained legal counsel to address the charges.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which was founded in 1952 to design nuclear weapons, is a federal facility administered by the Department of Energy and managed by the University of California. Its current responsibilities include research into other areas of science and engineering with national security applications.
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