Mona Shafer Edwards / AFP - Getty Images file

This Sept. 27 courtroom drawing shows Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in court on probation violation charges in Los Angeles.

A California man who was behind an anti-Muslim film that spurred violent protests in the Middle East was sentenced on Wednesday to one year in prison for violating the terms of his probation stemming from a 2010 bank fraud conviction.

Mark Basseley Youssef, a 55-year-old Egyptian-American, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Christina Snyder after he admitted four of eight alleged violations including obtaining a fraudulent California driver's license.

Youssef served most of a 21-month prison term in the bank fraud case. Federal authorities wanted Youssef to serve two years for the violations.

None of the violations had to do with the content of "Innocence of Muslims," a 13-minute film that mocks the prophet Mohammad as a religious fraud, pedophile and a womanizer. The movie sparked a torrent of violence in Libya and other parts of the Middle East, and dozens died.

Federal authorities have said they believe Youssef is responsible for the film, but they haven’t said whether he was the person who posted it online. He also wasn’t supposed to use any name other than his true legal name without the prior written approval of his probation officer.

At least three names have been associated with Youssef since the film trailer surfaced — Sam Bacile, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and Youssef. Bacile was the name attached to the YouTube account that posted the video.

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WASHINGTON -- An American Coptic Christian activist whose California TV facility was used to make an anti-Islam film that touched off protests across the Muslim world said he was deceived by the film's producer about its inflammatory content. 

In a statement posted on the blog of a prominent American anti-Islamic activist, Joseph Nassralla, founder of a Duarte, California-based group called Media for Christ, said he was a victim of "disinformation and smear" and the film's principal producer had altered its content without his knowledge. 

Slideshow: Anti-U.S. protests rock Mideast, Asia and northeast Africa

Akhtar Soomro / Reuters

Protests ignited by a controversial film that ridicules Islam's Prophet Muhammad spread throughout Muslim world.

Launch slideshow

Media for Christ operates a Christian satellite TV station called The Way TV, according to its website and tax return. 

Nassralla said he was contacted last year by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, whom he described as the film's producer, with a plan to make a film about the persecution of Christians in Egypt. 

Nakoula, who has a criminal record for bank fraud and drug offenses, was briefly questioned last weekend by federal authorities about possible probation violations. He was later released and has gone into hiding. 

Nassralla said in his statement that in explaining his film project, Nakoula had said the film would be called "Desert Warrior" and would "examine the culture of the desert and how it is related to what is going on right now." 

The statement was posted on the website Atlasshrugs2000, which is run by Pamela Geller, an activist who has organized anti-Islamic protests and events, including demonstrations opposing construction of an Islamic center near the site of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. 

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There was no way to independently confirm Nassralla's account. 

An attorney representing Nakoula in the investigation by probation officials declined to comment on Nassralla's statement, saying he was aware of the blog post but had not had a chance to discuss it with his client. He said Nakoula or his representatives may issue a statement in the future. 

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Nassralla, who spoke at two rallies in 2010 and 2011 organized by Geller, said Nakoula "needed a place to film. So I let him use my facility." 

"That is all I did, and is the full extent of my involvement with this project. Nakoula used my facility for ten days. Media for Christ employees were given a vacation during that time, because Nakoula was using the facility and so there was no work for them. There was only one Media for Christ employee who remained, to answer phones for the ministry," Nassralla said. 

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There was no sign of activity at the small studios of Media for Christ, located in a nondescript office park behind a Walmart store in suburban Duarte, during two visits last week by a Reuters reporter. 

On both occasions the doors were found locked and knocks went unanswered. A woman who worked at an office next door said she had not seen any employees there in recent days. 

Nassralla said he later discovered that Nakoula, using the name "Sam Bacile," had used Media for Christ's name without his permission to obtain an official permit for making the film.

'We were shocked'
After accounts of the film began circulating in Egypt and other Muslim majority countries, the amateurish production -- which portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer and a fool -- set off a chain of violent protests and attacks on U.S. and other Western embassies in the Middle East and North Africa. 

In his statement, Nassralla said Nakoula had "filmed his movie not only at my ministry location, but in Nakoula's own home (which reporters located by getting the address from the actors), and in another facility for outside scenes that was included in the permit, Blue Canyon." 

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Nassralla also said that behind his back, Nakoula had "altered the film without anyone's knowledge, changing its entire focus and dubbing in new dialogue. He edited it." 

"The final product, 'Innocence of Muslims,' bore no resemblance to the film I thought he was making, or the film the actors thought they were creating. We were shocked," Nassralla said. 

In an introduction to Nassralla's statement, Geller said that she had last seen him at an event in June in California, and that now he was being "hunted like an animal for speaking critically about Islam." 

Nassralla "is currently in hiding after multiple death threats from Muslims because of his purported role in producing this video," she said. 

In an exchange of emails with Reuters last weekend, Geller suggested that if Nakoula was arrested, that would represent an attempt to impose strict Islamic Sharia law in the United States. 

"He will not be in prison for fraud or some probation violation, but for blasphemy. This is Shariah enforcement in America," she said. 

In a later email, however, Geller expressed disappointment over Nassralla's account of his dealings with Nakoula. But she added, "That would not make (Nakoula) any less a political prisoner." 

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Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, National Intelligence Director James Clapper and other top diplomatic and security officials will huddle this week with lawmakers for a closed-door meeting on growing anti-U.S. violence in the Middle East and northern Africa, officials told NBC News on Tuesday.

The classified briefing was put together for House members after al-Qaida in the Maghreb, the North African branch of the terrorist group, published a call for followers to launch attacks on U.S. embassies and to kill U.S. diplomats.

The statement appeared to have been published Saturday, but it didn't come to widespread Western attention until Tuesday, when the Middle East monitoring service IntelCenter alerted its clients to the threat's appearance on a militant website. It called for attacks on U.S. interests around the world, but especially in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania.

The statement called the assassination last week of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, a "gift" that would "bring the Americans to the path of salvation and stop their war against Muslims."

Stevens was killed in a raid on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, along with three consulate staff members.

Clinton didn't mention the briefing in remarks to reporters in Mexico City, where she is holding talks with Mexican leaders on drug-interdiction strategies, but she said: "We are taking aggressive steps to protect our people and our consulates and embassies around the world.

"We are reviewing our security posture at every post and working with host governments to be sure they know what our security needs are wherever necessary," she said. "I think that it is important at this moment for leaders to put themselves on the right side of this debate — to speak out clearly and unequivocally against violence, whoever incites it or conducts it "

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The rise in violence has coincided with anger in the Muslim world after the publication on YouTube of a short trailer for an unreleased movie called "Innocence of Muslims," which depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a gay, wife-beating child abuser. At least 28 deaths — including those of Stevens and the three other Americans last week — have been attributed to riots and violence in at least 20 countries in reaction to the video.

In Afghanistan, NATO forces enacted tighter security measures Tuesday after rioters attacked police on a road to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and a suicide bomber blew up a bus near the Kabul airport, killing 12 foreign workers in an attack that Islamist militants said was in retaliation for the blasphemous video.

Col. Thomas Collins, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led contingent overseeing security in Afghanistan, told NBC News that the measures would put a temporary halt to joint operations with Afghan forces unless they were approved by a regional commander at the level of a general.

"We did a very thorough assessment," Collins said. "We looked at where we are right now with this video being out and some heightened tensions.

"We just thought it would be smartest on a temporary basis to reduce the amount of exposure of our troops in certain areas," he said.

More than 50 international troops have been killed this year in so-called green-on-blue attacks carried out by Afghan forces or militants disguised in Afghan uniforms.

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