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Bizarre events lead to deportation
Friday, December 28, 2001 By Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The government still doesn't know why 24-year-old Manel Fall of Senegal was carrying a false French passport when he arrived in Pittsburgh from Paris on Oct. 7, why he repeatedly lied to federal agents or why he said "someone" had sent him to New York to observe what was happening there.
"I just want to go home," he told a federal judge yesterday.
Whatever he was up to, he's getting his wish.
U.S. District Judge William Standish sentenced him to three months behind bars, giving him credit for time he has served in the Allegheny County Jail since his arrest the day he arrived. After that, he'll be turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and deported.
Standish told Fall his conduct was particularly egregious considering the events of Sept. 11 because it diverted the attention of immigration agents and the FBI, who were already overwhelmed with national security issues.
The mysterious case started when Fall represented himself as "Amadou Seck" and requested tourist status. He had a connecting flight to Newark, N.J., with a final destination of Manhattan.
When an immigration service inspector looked him over, he didn't match the image or the description on the passport. That document said he was 5 feet 11 inches tall, for example, but he stood an inch taller than an inspector who measures 6 feet 2 inches. He also couldn't reproduce the signature on the passport.
Inspectors snapped a photo of him and sent it by photo phone to an immigration service lab in Washington, D.C., for a comparison with the passport photo. They also asked him to write the name on the passport 10 times, then sent those names to the lab to compare with the signature on the passport.
The comparisons showed the man holding the passport was not Amadou Seck.
Confronted with that fact, he refused to say who he was. When asked in French what his real name was, he said cryptically, "It is too early for me to tell you that."
Immigration agents searched his bags and found a driver's license from Senegal in the name of Manel Amadou Fall, born May 16, 1975. Asked whose license that was, however, Fall said he didn't know.
When agents asked why he had come to the United States, he at first said he was afraid to say "too much." He later said he was from Sudan and had been sent to observe what was happening in New York. He wouldn't say who sent him or why. He also said he was a computer programmer but refused to name his employer.
Fall said he would swear on the Koran to answer questions, then immediately refused to give his real name.
When he finally did give it, he said he was born May 16, 1977, in Gabon, Africa. But he couldn't explain the two-year discrepancy between his birth date and the one on the license.
Immigration agents eventually located a Manel Fall who is a citizen of Senegal but lives in Saudi Arabia, but that person was born in 1958.
The discrepancies in the dates are just more pieces of a strange puzzle.
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