Federal agents arrested on Tuesday in Koblerville a man who was indicted for allegedly providing a false statement to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer.<\/p>\n
Benigno Ilo Mettao was taken to the U.S. District Court for the NMI on Tuesday afternoon for his initial appearance and arraignment.<\/p>\n
Mettao, through counsel, pleaded not guilty to an indictment charging him with one count of false statement.<\/p>\n
Attorney David Banes appeared for attorney Michael Dotts, the court-appointed counsel for Mettao. Dotts is off-island.<\/p>\n
U.S. District Court for the NMI Magistrate Judge Heather L. Kennedy set the jury trial for May 26, 2015, at 10am.<\/p>\n
Assistant U.S. attorney Russell Lorfing did not ask for Mettao\u2019s continued detention as the U.S. government does not believe he is a flight risk, but he requested the court to set conditions for Mettao\u2019s pretrial release.<\/p>\n
Kennedy ordered Mettao be released upon the posting of a $10,000 unsecured bond plus some release conditions.<\/p>\n
According to the indictment filed in court last March 13, in an interview with a USCIS officer on May 25, 2011, Mettao said he lived with Bao Qin Ding in the village of San Antonio.<\/p>\n
Mettao allegedly knew that his representations were false and fraudulent in that he did not live in San Antonio and had never lived with Bao Qin Ding. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Federal agents arrested on Tuesday in Koblerville a man who was indicted for allegedly providing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3057,93,2466,135],"class_list":["post-194289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-bao-qin-ding","tag-district-court","tag-russell-lorfing","tag-san-antonio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}