TAMPA, Fla. — A Tampa father was formally sentenced this week after pleading guilty in a case in which he was accused of kidnapping his son and taking him to Lebanon in 2018, according to the Department of Justice.
Ali Hussein Salamey, now 40, was sentenced to two years in prison for passport fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection to the kidnapping case.
After Salamey's child was born in 2014, court orders prohibited either parent from obtaining a passport for the child, or taking the child out of the state without leave of the court, according to court documents. However, the father would go on to apply for Lebanese travel documents from the Lebanese Embassy in Washington D.C. for the child, the Department of Justice reports.
"To do so, Salamey submitted a fraudulent maternal consent form on which he had forged [the mother's] signature. The embassy denied the application," according to the DOJ.
In a second attempt, Salamey reportedly submitted a fraudulent judgment of paternity to the Lebanese Consulate in Michigan that he modified to make it look like the court awarded him, rather than the child's mother, Rachelle Smith, sole parental responsibility. This time, a Lebanese consulate issued a Lebanese passport for the child.
The DOJ says on Aug. 25, 2018, Salamey used a fraudulently acquired passport to take his 3-year-old child at the time to Beirut, Lebanon, where they lived for the next 10 months.
"Lebanon is not a party to the Hague Convention, which obligates member countries to return children abducted abroad; nor does it have an extradition treaty with the United States," according tot he DOJ.
However, the Lebanese government later agreed to help bring the child back to the U.S. and the two returned on June 21, 2019.
Upon their return to the states, the child was returned to his mother and Salamey was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, where his international flight returned, the DOJ reports.
