Washington, D.C.

Dulles security director suspended after DUI arrest

The head of security at Washington Dulles International Airport was placed on administrative leave because of his arrest on drunken driving charges as the airport was on a heightened state of alert early New Year’s Day for terrorist activity, the Transportation Security Administration said Friday.

Charles Brady, acting federal security director at Dulles, was pulled over at 1 a.m. EST Thursday, hours after a British Airways jetliner was detained at the airport because of intelligence information.

Airport spokeswoman Tara Hamilton said a Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority police officer took Brady into custody after he saw him driving erratically. It was unclear whether Brady was supposed to have been on duty when he was arrested.

The Transportation Security Administration named Adm. James Schear acting federal security director at Dulles during an investigation of Brady’s arrest, agency spokesman Darrin Kayser said.

Washington, D.C.

Tip leads IRS to audit its own

The Internal Revenue Service is auditing about 800 of its employees after discovering that a handful of the agency’s workers might have cheated on their tax returns.

“I am disappointed that a small but unacceptable number of our employees have generated false business deductions to reduce their taxes,” IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson said Friday in a statement. “We have a zero-tolerance standard for abuse of the tax laws by employees.”

The probe of IRS employees comes during the agency’s biggest crackdown on tax cheating in more than a decade. During the past three years, the IRS has been hiring additional agents and examiners, and attempting to find more efficient ways to ferret out and prosecute domestic and international tax schemes. That effort has resulted in dozens of lawsuits, indictments and settlements.

The audits were spurred by a tip from an IRS employee that some agency workers might be filing bogus Schedule C tax forms, which are used to list profit and loss from self-employment or a small business.

Washington, D.C.

Navy seizes another boat with hashish in Persian Gulf

The U.S. Navy has seized another small boat carrying drugs near the Persian Gulf after interrogating smugglers with suspected links to the al-Qaida terrorist network, the military announced Friday.

The boat seized on New Year’s Day was the fourth drug-smuggling vessel intercepted by Americans in the past two weeks in or near the Persian Gulf. Pentagon officials say they think all four boats, which were carrying hashish, heroin and methamphetamines, are part of a drug-smuggling operation that funnels money to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.

An American search of the boat, a wooden vessel called a dhow, found about 2,800 pounds of hashish with an estimated street value of $11 million, according to a statement from the Navy’s 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain.

U.S. Navy ships stopped the boat Thursday in the northern Arabian Sea. Searchers found the drugs Friday under blocks of ice and in hidden compartments in the vessel.