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Washington is investigating how a member of a radical Egyptian Islamist group listed as a terrorist organization met with senior officials during a visit to the United States this week.
Newly-elected Egyptian lawmaker Hani Nour Eldin (pictured), who says he’s a member of Gamaa Islamiyya, Egypt’s largest militant group, was among the delegation who traveled to the US.
“We are looking into the circumstances of this particular case,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
“Anybody issued a visa goes through a full set of screenings. Those screenings, however, do depend on the integrity of the information that’s available to us at the time we make the screen.”
Gamaa Islamiyya militants participated, along with members of Egyptian group Islamic Jihad, in the 1981 attack that killed then-president Anwar Sadat.
The group also claimed responsibility for a devastating attack in Egypt’s southern city of Luxor in 1997 that killed 62 people, most of them tourists.
Long designated a terrorist organization, its spiritual head is Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, jailed for life over the 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing.
Members of any blacklisted terror group are barred from entry to the United States and liable to deportation if caught.
Nuland confirmed Eldin was with the delegation when it met at the State Department with officials, including Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.
“They were meetings with the entire delegation talking about transference of civilian rule, the protection of human rights in a democracy, all these kinds of things,” Nuland said.
Eldin told Newsweek magazine that he had accepted the US visa “as a member of the parliament representing a political party that has been elected and is a legitimate party.”
“I was personally not involved in any violent action or terrorism against the United States or any other country,” he said.
“The years I spent in prison were under the regime of (Hosni) Mubarak, these were political charges and there was no judicial basis for them.”
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