Iraqi Indicted in Plot to Kill U.S. Opponents

A federal grand jury Friday indicted a former employee of Iraq’s United Nations mission, charging that he was part of a plot to assassinate opponents of the Iraqi government in this country.

Also involved in the alleged murder-for-hire scheme was an Iraqi diplomat assigned to the U.N. mission in New York City, who was expelled from the United States on Thursday, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

The indictment charges that Andri Khoshaba of Modesto, employed until about a year ago as a doorman for Iraq’s U.N. mission and now a fugitive, was promised $50,000 by an unnamed agent of the Iraqi government to kill two men who were outspoken in opposing Iraqi government policies.

The indictment of Khoshaba is the second incident involving allegations of criminal activity by Iraqi nationals on American soil in recent weeks. Late last month, U.S. and British agents seized 40 Iraq-bound nuclear bomb triggers at Heathrow Airport in London, where six people, including two Iraqi nationals, were arrested. The arrests were the result of an international sting operation, which reportedly began when two Iraqis approached firms in San Diego and Massachusetts to buy the sophisticated electronic devices used to trigger nuclear weapons.

However, a State Department statement said that there was no connection between the seizure of the nuclear devices and Friday’s charges of an assassination plot.

One of the targets of the alleged assassination plot was Sargon Dadesho, an Iraqi-born U.S. citizen who produces Assyrian-language radio and television broadcasts from the rural California Central Valley town of Ceres.

Dadesho also heads the Assyrian National Congress, an international group that has protested the Iraqi government’s treatment of its million-strong Assyrian minority.

“Because of my activities, they tried to get me,” Dadesho said Friday. He said he had met Khoshaba at parties and other functions held by the Assyrian community.

The other intended victim of the alleged scheme, according to Dadesho and other sources, was a visitor to the United States, a Kurd who was protesting Iraq’s treatment of the 3.5 million Kurds who live within the country’s borders.

The grand jury indictment charges Khoshaba, 47, on two counts of violating federal law that bars interstate travel for purposes of murder for hire.

U.S. Atty. David F. Levi said that Khoshaba was arrested on Feb. 17 and held for 48 hours but was released because, at the time, there was not enough evidence for an indictment.

“We were at the point when the investigation was still quite in its initial stages,” Levi said. “Therefore, we weren’t in a position to bring an indictment, but we were unwilling to take the risk that the scheme would go forward for the obvious reason that someone might get killed.”

Before his arrest, Khoshaba traveled twice in February to New York City to meet with the agent of the Iraqi government who allegedly offered the payment for the assassinations, the indictment says.

Levi would not name the Iraqi official who allegedly made the offer, but he said that the State Department had stepped into the incident. “The U.S. government asked the government of Iraq to withdraw a diplomat from their mission to the U.N. in New York, and the diplomat departed the U.S. on April 5,” Levi said. The U.S. action was a response to the alleged assassination plot, he said.

Other sources familiar with the investigation made it clear that the ousted diplomat was the “agent of the government of Iraq” described in the grand jury indictment. Levi affirmed that U.N. diplomats cannot be charged under U.S. law.

Levi would not confirm reports from other sources that Khoshaba had fled the country. He said he was hopeful that the indicted man will be apprehended.

Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdul Amir A. Al-Anbari, said that he knew nothing about the allegations of a plot involving Khoshaba and an Iraqi diplomat.

He said Khoshaba was “a sort of doorman” at the ambassadorial residence, a palatial townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “His employment was terminated about a year ago, several months before I arrived,” Al-Anbari said. “I believe he was dismissed over some sort of domestic quarrel.”

Al-Anbari’s predecessor as U.N. ambassador, Ismat Kittani, said that Khoshaba frequently quarreled with the mission’s other servants. Although Levi described Khoshaba as an Iraqi citizen, Kittani said: “I’m sure he was an American citizen. He worked in Chicago and Detroit before he came to us.”

The flat, blooming fields of the Central Valley seem far removed in temperament as well as distance from the factional politics of the Middle East.

But for 42-year-old Dadesho, the treatment of his fellow Assyrians in the land of his birth has become a full-time vocation. The Assyrian language programming he produces for Bet-Bahrain Inc. is broadcast over the airways and on cable in Modesto. Tapes of the broadcasts are distributed throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East.

He said that some Assyrians are fighting alongside Kurds in northern Iraq against the country’s central government. However, he said that his organization is pressing for human rights and not insisting on a completely independent Assyrian state. “We want to be able to live peacefully,” he said.

Jacobs reported from Sacramento, Ostrow from Washington. Times staff writer Don Shannon in New York contributed to this story.