U.S. Appeals Citizenship for Armenian

U.S. government lawyers asked a federal appeals court Tuesday to reverse a Los Angeles judge who gave U.S. citizenship last year to a man convicted with four others in a 1982 plot to transport dynamite to bomb the office of a Turkish diplomat.

The man, Viken Yacoubian, 39, is now considered a leader in east Hollywood’s Little Armenia community. Yacoubian is the principal of the Rose and Alex Pilibos Armenian School, a K-12 campus with more than 800 students.

By conferring citizenship on Yacoubian, U.S. District Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer stopped the Immigration and Naturalization Service from initiating deportation proceedings against him, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

They also argued that a sealing order imposed by Pfaelzer in the dynamite plot case prevented crucial evidence from being considered in the pending naturalization application by Yacoubian, who was born in Lebanon of Armenian ancestry.

Terming the plot a case of international terrorism, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jean Rosenbluth told a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena that Pfaelzer “abused her discretion” because she had “no authority to seal the record as she did in this case.”

“It hides history,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Lawrence E. Kole said of the judge’s action.

The case, which has been appealed over various issues for more than a decade, has attracted interest among Armenian Americans.

Yacoubian, a teenager at the time, and four others were arrested in November 1982 after FBI agents seized dynamite in the baggage claim area at Boston’s Logan International Airport. The explosives had been flown from Los Angeles as part of a plan to bomb the Philadelphia office of the honorary Turkish consul general.

At the time, some Armenians in the United States and elsewhere were resorting to violence to pressure the Turkish government to accept responsibility for the deaths of more than 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Turk government during World War I and afterward. Since then, Turkey has rejected any responsibility and has refused to pay reparations.

Yacoubian was convicted in a trial before Pfaelzer and served two years in prison under a federal youth corrections act. After the time was served, his conviction was set aside under the terms of the act, thereby allowing Yacoubian to go to college and eventually become the head of the well-regarded Pilibos school.

Before granting him citizenship, Pfaelzer received many recommendations from Armenian American activists and some elected officials who cited Yacoubian’s rehabilitation and educational leadership of a school now undergoing expansion. In a recent interview, Yacoubian said he has renounced violence and is concentrating on getting his students to excel academically.

Federal prosecutors do not challenge the setting aside of Yacoubian’s conviction, but are appealing the judge’s resentencing of co-defendant Viken Hosvepian, 41, under the youth act because they say he was too old to qualify for a shorter sentence.

During his arguments Tuesday, Yacoubian’s lawyer, Michael Lightfoot, said Pfaelzer’s citizenship action was appropriate because the INS gave up its jurisdiction by waiting too long to act on Yacoubian’s naturalization application.

Lightfoot stressed that federal law allows a federal judge to step in and act on an application when the INS fails to do so.

Kole countered that the judge’s action was particularly worrisome because Yacoubian and other defendants refused to answer application questions about their current membership in Armenian organizations that advocate violence.

“They answered all of the INS’ questions,” Lightfoot said.

As the lawyers wrangled, federal appellate Judge Andrew Kleinfeld interjected that such an action conferring citizenship was “so unusual for a [U.S.] district judge.”

Kleinfeld and the two other appeals judges, Dorothy W. Nelson and Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain, took the case under submission and did not say when the panel might rule.