Posts Tagged ‘imposter’
Taliban impostor duped those truly sharp Afghan officials
What – me worry?
A man who has been representing Taliban senior leadership in secret talks with the Afghan government appears to have been an impostor.
The man, calling himself Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the Taliban’s second-ranking official, was exposed after another man who knows Mansour did not recognise him during a negotiation session…
The secret talks with the impostor had been going on for months and were used by senior US officials to claim progress on the diplomatic front in the Afghan war.
NATO and Afghan officials told the New York Times they held three meetings with the man, who allegedly received large sums of money to take part in the negotiations.
The fake Taliban leader, who travelled from across the border in Pakistan, even met with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, in the presidential palace in Kabul, the capital. He was flown to the capital on NATO aircraft…
I’ll bet the TSA would have caught him, right?
Al Jazeera’s Sue Turton, reporting from Kabul, said US officials always held suspicions about the identity of the man.
“Americans here admit that they don’t often know what these people look like; that they can only go on who they say they are because these people have been hiding and fighting this insurgency for so long,” she said.
“So they have to go on trust to a certain extent, and it seems that this particular man has managed to get away with it.”
Har!
Egyptian court upholds exam ban on wearing the niqab veil
A court in Egypt has ruled in favour of the government’s decision to ban students from wearing the face veil (niqab) while taking university examinations. But female students who had appealed the ban when it was originally imposed by the government last October have vowed to appeal the verdict.
The students said the ban on niqab infringed on their religious rights…
Nizar Ghorab, the lawyer of the students, said the ban “supports rape and sexual harassment”.
“It forces a woman to expose part of her body she doesn’t want exposed. It is soul-crushing for these women,” he told Al Jazeera.
The government said it banned the niqab in part because students, male and female, were attending exams disguised as other candidates by wearing a face veil…
Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh, reporting from the Egyptian capital, Cairo, said the trial reflected a divide in the Egyptian society
“It highlights the intensifying divide between the government’s brand of moderate Islam and a population increasingly turning to stricter interpretations of the religion.
“For some, covering up has even been a tacit defiance against the system.”
Hiding behind religion for personal gain is nothing new. Is it? 
Brooklyn hustler posed as his own dead mother
A Brooklyn man who police said dressed in drag to impersonate his dead mother and collect $115,000 in Social Security check and rent subsidies has been indicted on 47 counts of grand larceny, forgery and conspiracy.
Thomas Prusik-Parkin’s alleged accomplice, Mhilton Rimolo, was also indicted and both men face up to 25 years in prison if they’re convicted…
Prusik-Parkin’s six-year scam came to a crashing end on Monday when the 49-year-old from Park Slope was arrested…
Prusik-Parkin’s alleged scam began in 2003 when his mother, Irene Prusik, died at age 73.
Her son allegedly gave the funeral director the wrong Social Security number and date of birth for his mother so that her death would not be registered in government databases.
He began collecting $700 a month in Social Security in her name, in addition to his own disability checks, sources said.
Authorities said Prusik-Parkin also posed as his mother to file for bankruptcy so “she” would be eligible for $39,000 in city subsidies to help pay rent on a Park Slope apartment.
RTFA. A classic example of a slimeball hustler. He worked so hard at being a crook he probably would have expended less energy being an honest man.
