Saddam's Stepson Arrested In Florida

Saddam Hussein's stepson, being held in Florida for immigration violations, has admitted he made an error in his application for an entry visa to the United States, officials in New Zealand said Friday.

The Iraqi leader's stepson, Mohammed Nour al-Din Saffi, a citizen of New Zealand, now accepts he will be deported from the United States after failing to get the proper visa to cover his flight training program, New Zealand Foreign Ministry spokesman Brad Tattersfield told The Associated Press.

According to James Goldman of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Mohammed Saffi was preparing to take a course at the Aerospace Aviation Center in Miami, a flight school where some of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers were students.

Goldman also says Saffi had worked as a pilot on Boeing 747s and was seeking training to become recertified.

FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela says agents with a federal anti-terrorism task force arrested Saffi on Wednesday at a Miami hotel.

Saffi, a flight engineer who lived in New Zealand, flew from New Zealand and entered the United States on Tuesday, in Los Angeles. He was under federal scrutiny as he then made his way to Miami, on a commercial flight to Miami International Airport.

"He was coming here for flight engineer training," says Orihuela, noting that Saffi does not have the student visa required for foreign citizens to attend flight training schools in the United States.

Saffi, born in 1966, is being held at the Krome Detention Center south of Miami and is being processed to be deported to New Zealand.

The FBI declined to say how investigators learned of his connection with Hussein and his whereabouts.

Goldman, an assistant director for investigations at the I.N.S., told a Miami television station that "we find the circumstance to be somewhat disturbing."

The United States toughened visa requirements for foreign citizens attending flight schools after the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington. Some of the hijackers implicated in the attacks, which killed some 3,000 people, had trained at Florida flight schools and received training on flight simulators in Miami.

According to a December 12 report in the New Zealand Herald, Saffi worked for Air New Zealand, lived in Auckland with his family and had been in New Zealand since at least 1997.

The newspaper said New Zealand authorities investigated his background last year after the Sept. 11 attacks and after learning of his connection with the Iraqi president but took no action.

The newspaper quoted Saffi as saying that he did not want any publicity and that he did not object to the questioning by New Zealand authorities.

"They have the right to ask any time they want," the newspaper quoted him as saying. "I don't have a problem at all. I do work in a secure area; I do fly with the airplanes as well. ... I think they went and asked all the people who work in aviation all over the world."

It also quoted him as saying he was considering other work options, possibly overseas.

"If I get a good offer, I will go away ... work tax-free for a couple of years, pay my mortgage and come back and relax," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

The Herald said Saffi's mother is believed to be a former flight attendant who was Hussein's mistress in the late 1980s and later married him, and that his father was a former senior official with Iraqi Airways.