APNewsBreak: US identifies anti-Muslim filmmaker

EILEEN SULLIVAN

STEPHEN BRAUN

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Fed­eral author­i­ties have iden­ti­fied a Cop­tic Chris­t­ian in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia who is on pro­ba­tion after his con­vic­tion for finan­cial crimes as the key fig­ure behind the anti-Muslim film that ignited mob vio­lence against U.S. embassies across the Mideast, a U.S. law enforce­ment offi­cial told The Asso­ci­ated Press on Thursday.

The offi­cial said author­i­ties had con­cluded that Nakoula Bas­se­ley Nakoula, 55, was behind “Inno­cence of Mus­lims,” a film that den­i­grated Islam and the prophet Muham­mad and sparked protests ear­lier this week in Egypt, Libya and most recently in Yemen. It was not imme­di­ately clear whether Nakoula was the tar­get of a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion or part of the broader inves­ti­ga­tion into the deaths of U.S. Ambas­sador Chris Stevens and three other Amer­i­cans in Libya dur­ing a ter­ror­ist attack.

Attor­ney Gen­eral Eric Holder con­firmed Thurs­day that Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cials were inves­ti­gat­ing the deaths, which occurred dur­ing an attack on the Amer­i­can mis­sion in Benghazi.

The offi­cial, who spoke on con­di­tion of anonymity because he was not autho­rized to dis­cuss an ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tion, said Nakoula was con­nected to the per­sona of Sam Bacile, a man who ini­tially told the AP he was the film’s writer and direc­tor. But Bacile turned out to be a false iden­tity, and the AP traced a cell­phone num­ber Bacile used to a south­ern Cal­i­for­nia house where it located and inter­viewed Nakoula.

Bacile ini­tially told AP he was Jew­ish and Israeli, although Israeli offi­cials said they had no records of such a cit­i­zen. Oth­ers involved in the film said his state­ments were con­trived, as evi­dence mounted that the film’s key player was a Cop­tic Chris­t­ian with a check­ered past.

Nakoula told the AP in an inter­view out­side Los Ange­les on Wednes­day that he man­aged logis­tics for the com­pany that pro­duced the film. Nakoula denied he was Bacile and said he did not direct the film, though he said he knew Bacile.

Fed­eral court papers filed against Nakoula in a 2010 crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion noted that he had used numer­ous aliases, includ­ing Nicola Bacily, Robert Bacily, Erwin Salameh and others.

Dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion out­side his home, Nakoula offered his driver’s license to show his iden­tity but kept his thumb over his mid­dle name, Bas­se­ley. Records checks by the AP sub­se­quently found that mid­dle name as well as other con­nec­tions to the Bacile persona.

The AP located the man call­ing him­self Bacile after obtain­ing his cell­phone num­ber from Mor­ris Sadek, a con­ser­v­a­tive Cop­tic Chris­t­ian in the U.S. who has pro­moted the anti-Muslim film in recent days on his web­site. Egypt’s Chris­t­ian Cop­tic pop­u­lace has long decried what they describe as a his­tory of dis­crim­i­na­tion and occa­sional vio­lence from the country’s Mus­lim majority.

Pas­tor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Fla., who sparked out­rage in the Arab world when he burned Qurans on the ninth anniver­sary of 9/11, said he spoke with the movie’s direc­tor on the phone Wednes­day and prayed for him. Jones said he has not met the film­maker in per­son but added that the man con­tacted him a few weeks ago about pro­mot­ing the movie. Jones and oth­ers who have dealt with the film­maker said Wednes­day that Bacile was hid­ing his real identity.

“I have not met him. Sam Bacile, that is not his real name,” Jones said. “He is def­i­nitely in hid­ing and does not reveal his identity.”

The YouTube account under the user­name “Sam Bacile” was used to pub­lish excerpts of the provoca­tive movie in July and was used to post com­ments online as recently as Tues­day, includ­ing this defense of the film writ­ten in Ara­bic: “It is a 100 per­cent Amer­i­can movie, you cows.”

Nakoula, who talked guard­edly with AP about his role, pleaded no con­test in 2010 to fed­eral bank fraud charges in Cal­i­for­nia and was ordered to pay more than $790,000 in resti­tu­tion. He was also sen­tenced to 21 months in fed­eral prison and was ordered not to use com­put­ers or the Inter­net for five years with­out approval from his pro­ba­tion officer.

Assis­tant U.S. Attor­ney Jen­nifer Leigh Williams said Nakoula set up fraud­u­lent bank accounts using stolen iden­ti­ties and Social Secu­rity num­bers; then, checks from those accounts would be deposited into other bogus accounts from which Nakoula would with­draw money at ATM machines.

It was “basi­cally a check-kiting scheme,” the pros­e­cu­tor told the AP. “You try to get the money out of the bank before the bank real­izes they are drawn from a fraud­u­lent account. There basi­cally is no money.”

Prior to his bank fraud con­vic­tion, Nakoula strug­gled with a series of finan­cial prob­lems in recent years, accord­ing to Cal­i­for­nia state tax and bank­ruptcy records. In June 2006, a $191,000 tax lien was filed against him in the Los Ange­les County Recorder of Deeds office. In 1997, a $106,000 lien was filed against him in Orange County.

Amer­i­can actors and actresses who appeared in “Inno­cence of Mus­lims” issued a joint state­ment Wednes­day say­ing they were mis­led about the project and alleged that some of their dia­logue was crudely dubbed dur­ing post-production.

In the English-language ver­sion of the trailer, direct ref­er­ences to Muham­mad appear to be the result of post-production changes to the movie. Either actors aren’t seen when the name “Muham­mad” is spo­ken in the over­dubbed sound, or they appear to be mouthing some­thing else as the name of the prophet is spoken.

“The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advan­tage of by the pro­ducer,” said the state­ment, obtained by the Los Ange­les Times. “We are 100 per­cent not behind this film and were grossly mis­led about its intent and pur­pose. We are shocked by the dras­tic rewrites of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply sad­dened by the tragedies that have occurred.”

One of the actresses, Cindy Lee Gar­cia, told KERO-TV in Bak­ers­field that the film was orig­i­nally titled “Desert War­riors” and the script did not con­tain offen­sive ref­er­ences to Islam.

“When I found out this movie had caused all this havoc, I called Sam and asked him why, what hap­pened, why did he do this? I said, ‘Why did you do this to us, to me and to us?’ And he said, ‘Tell the world that it wasn’t you that did it, it was me, the one who wrote the script, because I’m tired of the rad­i­cal Mus­lims run­ning around killing every­one,’” she said.

Gar­cia said the direc­tor, who called him­self Sam Bacile, told her then that he was Egyptian.

The man iden­ti­fy­ing him­self as Bacile told the AP he was an Israeli-born, 56-year-old Jew­ish writer and direc­tor. But a Chris­t­ian activist involved in the film project, Steve Klein, told the AP on Wednes­day that Bacile was a pseu­do­nym and that the man was Chris­t­ian. Klein had told the AP on Tues­day that the film­maker was an Israeli Jew who was con­cerned for fam­ily mem­bers who live in Egypt.

About 15 key play­ers from the Mid­dle East — peo­ple from Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Pak­istan and Iran, and a cou­ple of Cop­tic Chris­tians from Egypt — worked on the film, Klein said.

“Most of them won’t tell me their real names because they’re ter­ri­fied,” Klein said.

An offi­cial of the Cop­tic Ortho­dox Church in Los Ange­les said in a state­ment Thurs­day that the church’s adher­ents had no involve­ment in the “inflam­ma­tory movie about the prophet of Islam.” An offi­cial iden­ti­fied as Bishop Ser­a­pion of the Cop­tic Ortho­dox of Los Ange­les, said that “the pro­duc­ers of this movie should be respon­si­ble for their actions. The name of our blessed parish­ioners should not be asso­ci­ated with the efforts of indi­vid­u­als who have ulte­rior motives.”

The South­ern Poverty Law Cen­ter, which mon­i­tors hate groups, said Klein is a for­mer Marine and long­time religious-right activist who has helped train para­mil­i­tary mili­tias at a Cal­i­for­nia church. It described Klein as founder of Coura­geous Chris­tians United, which con­ducts protests out­side abor­tion clin­ics, Mor­mon tem­ples and mosques.

Google Inc., which owns YouTube, pulled down the video Wednes­day in Egypt, cit­ing a legal com­plaint. It was still acces­si­ble in the U.S. and other countries.

Posted by AP News on Sep 13 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.