St. Paul Pioneer Press
LOS ANGELES — A Southern California filmmaker linked to an anti-Islamic movie inflaming protests across the Middle East was interviewed Saturday, Sept. 15, by federal probation officers at a Los Angeles sheriff’s station.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, was interviewed for about half an hour in his hometown of Cerritos, Calif., said Steve Whitmore at the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department.
After that, deputies dropped Nakoula off. “We don’t know where he went,” Whitmore said.
Nakoula pleaded no contest to bank fraud charges in 2010 and was banned from using computers or the Internet or using false identities as part of his sentence. If he has violated the terms of his five-year probation, a judge could send him back to prison.
Nakoula, a self-described Coptic Christian, has been identified as the key figure behind the actual filming of “Innocence of Muslims.”
Much of the film was shot inside the offices of Media for Christ, a nonprofit based in the Los Angeles-area city of Duarte.
Copyright 2012 St. Paul Pioneer Press