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A former Olympic athlete from Iraq has been charged with running a global scheme to smuggle hundreds of Middle Easterners into the United States, according to Justice Department officials in El Paso, where a federal indictment was unsealed Thursday.
George Tajirian, 56, a Mexico City resident who rode as a bicyclist on Iraq's 1968 Olympic team, allegedly used his own travel agencies in Cuba and Ecuador to smuggle more than 250 illegal immigrants across the Texas-Mexico border over the last two years--most of them from Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, according to U.S. authorities.
"This is a big step forward for our crackdown on alien smuggling," Atty. Gen. Janet...