A man linked to an anti-Islam video
that sparked riots across the
Muslim world has been held
without bond after a hearing in Los
Angeles, California.
A judge said Nakoula Basseley
Nakoula, 55, was a flight risk and
cited a pattern of deception when
making his ruling, Reuters news
agency reported.
Nakoula was investigated for violating
probation terms after he was
released from prison in 2011 for
bank fraud.
He has not been detained over the
contents of the inflammatory video.
Nakoula, a 55-year-old Christian
originally from Egypt, allegedly
produced the 14-minute trailer for
the film Innocence of Muslims. He
had been in hiding after the release
of the video.
After his 2010 conviction, he was
sentenced to 21 months in prison
and, under the terms of his
probation, he was banned from
using computers or accessing the
internet for five years without an
officer's permission.
US Central District Chief Magistrate
Judge Suzanne Segal said: "the court
has a lack of trust in this defendant at
this time".
Assistant Attorney Robert Dugdale
said the court believed Nakoula was
flight risk.
"He has every incentive to
disappear," he said.
First amendment
A clip from the US-made film was
dubbed into Arabic, provoking
widespread anger for its disrespectful
portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.
The film was made on a very low
budget, with insults and offensive
inferences to the Prophet
Mohammad and Islam crudely
dubbed on afterwards.
Earlier, the Obama administration
had requested Google, the company
that owns YouTube, to remove the
clip. The technology firm refused,
saying the film did not violate its
rules.
The clip was uploaded to YouTube in
July, but violence broke out over the
video on 11 September.
The clip has not broken any laws in
the US, where freedom of speech is
enshrined in the constitution's first
amendment.
Four Americans, including US
Ambassador Christopher Stevens,
were killed in an attack on the US
consulate in Benghazi, Libya earlier
this month.
Meanwhile, some of the actors in the
video have come forward to say they
were misled. They said had been
hired to appear in a film called Desert
Warriors, which did not mention
Islam or the Prophet Muhammad in
the script.
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