With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff. NewsMax.com. Thursday August 31, 2000; 5:12 PM EDT
More than four months after the Immigration and Naturalization Service seized Cuban boat boy Elian Gonzalez from his home in Miami's Little Havana, the agency has still not resolved allegations that its agents beat and held at gunpoint an NBC camera crew during the raid.
"The investigation hasn't been concluded yet," INS spokeswoman Maria Cardona told NewsMax.com late Thursday. "There's still one outstanding issue and I'm waiting to hear from our Internal Audit Bureau as to when they'll be done."
Cardona would not identify the point of dispute but said she expected INS's probe to end within the next month.
NBC cameraman Tony Zumbado and soundman Gustavo Moller made the assault allegations immediately after the April 22 raid. Reached by NewsMax.com Thursday, neither would comment on the agency's failure to resolve their charges.
Four days after the raid, NBC News Vice President Bill Wheatley filed a formal complaint with the INS charging that the deliberate actions of its agents prevented Zumbado and Moller from doing their jobs. Because of the altercation, the NBC crew was unable to provide live pool video coverage of
the raid from inside the Gonzalez house, leaving the most controversial moments of the raid unfilmed.
According to an after action report released by the agency, the federal raiders were a model of propriety. "Our indications are that no profanity was used, no one was knocked to the ground or held forceably at gunpoint during the raid," Cardona told the Orlando Sun-Sentinel in June.
Cameraman Zumbado sharply disputed that account, telling the paper, "It's a pack of lies; a whitewash. The agents were physically and verbally abusive; they said every bad word in the book and kept me from doing my job."
The story Zumbado has repeatedly told is that federal agents assaulted him the moment he entered the Gonzalez house, kicking him in the stomach and forcing him to the floor, where an agent held him at gunpoint until the raid was over.
Outside Moller was being held at gunpoint as well, after one raider butted him in the head with a rifle barrel.
"If this had happened to an American journalist in Cuba or Colombia, the U.S. government would have filed a complaint," the NBC cameraman told the Sun-Sentinel.
NBC Vice President Bill Wheatley, who filed the original complaint with the INS, was unavailable for comment on Thursday.
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