The federal government approved a visa for a national from Saudi Arabia in 2011 who attended an al-Qaeda training camp, the Islamic terrorist organization responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks.

This week, 35-year-old Saudi citizen Naif Abdulaziz M. Alfallaj was convicted and sentenced to more than 12 years in prison for failing to disclose his ties to al-Qaeda when applying for a nonimmigrant visa to come to the U.S.

In late 2011, Alfallaj arrived in the U.S. after the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency approved him for a nonimmigrant visa solely because his wife had come to the country on a foreign student visa.

Alfallaj falsely claimed in federal paperwork that he had never supported terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and had no connections to terrorist networks in his native region. After being approved to enter the U.S., Alfallaj started attending flight school in Oklahoma, an identical routine to the 9/11 terrorists who came to the country on nonimmigrant visas and attended flight school.

It was not until February 2018 that Alfallaj was taken into federal custody by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after they discovered that his fingerprints were found all over an application to an al-Qaeda training camp.

According to federal prosecutors, 15 of Alfallaj’s fingerprints were found on applications for the “al Farooq” terrorist training camp, which was a central hub for terrorists to be trained leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Alfallaj pleaded guilty to the charges in December 2018, admitting that he fraudulently obtained his nonimmigrant visa to enter the U.S. Now, he will spend more than 12 years in prison before being deported to Saudi Arabia.

As Breitbart News has reported, there are currently more than 10,000 illegal aliens living in the U.S. who are from countries designated by the State Department as being sponsors of terrorism, including Syria, Sudan, and Iran. Similarly, the Diversity Visa Lottery — which randomly gives out 55,000 visas every year — has imported nearly 30,000 foreign nationals from state-sponsors of terrorism to the country since 2007.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.