A former cook at a Laurel shish kebab shop has pleaded guilty to lying about his ties to Saddam Hussein’s government on immigration forms, federal prosecutors in Maryland said.

Mouyad Mahmoud Darwish, 48, was born in a Iraq, but became a Canadian citizen in 1994, according to court documents. That was six years before he moved to the United States to work as an accountant and driver for the Iraqi Interests Section, a quasi-Iraqi embassy housed in the Algerian Embassy in the years before the United States toppled Hussein’s regime.