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Albania Seizes Assets Of Bin Laden Associate TIRANA (AP)--The Albanian government has seized the assets and bank accounts of a man who allegedly worked with Osama bin Laden and others to provide support to terror networks in Albania, the Finance Ministry said Wednesday. Abdul Latif Saleh, who holds Jordanian and Albanian citizenship, was placed on a U.N. sanctions list in September, requiring all U.N. members to impose a travel ban on him and block his assets. Albania earlier had blocked 33 bank accounts in three commercial banks as well as assets and investments in Saleh's businesses and civic organizations he...

<p>A task force of federal agents has ratcheted up a two-year-old antiterrorism investigation aimed at several Virginia-based Islamic charities suspected of diverting millions of dollars to terror network al Qaeda and other militant radicals.</p> <p>Led by agents of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI, the task-force probe has targeted a number of people tied to several private companies and interrelated Islamic charities operating out of business fronts in Herndon and Falls Church.</p>

BOSTON -- Two former officers of an Islamic charity were arrested on Thursday after they were indicted on federal charges of lying to authorities investigating the charity's alleged ties to terrorist organizations. Emadeddin Z. Muntasser, the former president of Care International, and Muhammed Mubayyid, the defunct charity's former treasurer, were arrested Wednesday on charges of concealing information from federal agencies, conspiring to defraud the United States, and making false statements to the FBI. "Organizations that conceal their true activities to abuse our tax laws, and in this case fund their support of the mujahideen and jihad, will be prosecuted to...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A leading fund-raiser for an Islamic charity with alleged links to the Palestinian militant group Hamas was ordered deported Tuesday. An immigration judge ruled that Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, 44, should have known that his work for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development provided support for the group. "Our laws prohibit aliens who are living here as our guests to use this country as a base to advocate terrorism or raise money for terrorist causes," said John Salter, Los Angeles chief counsel for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The judge did not name a country...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

Counterterrorism efforts got a major boost last week when an American district court found three Muslim organizations and one individual, mostly based in the Chicago area, guilty of funding Hamas and fined them an astonishing US$156 million. The four were found liable for their roles in the murder of an American teenager, David Boim, on May 13, 1996, when he was shot by Hamas operatives as he waited for a bus near Jerusalem. This case is important in itself, providing some measure of justice and relief for the Boim family. Beyond that, it helps fight terrorism in four ways.First, it...

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the US Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday it had deported Rabih Haddad to Lebanon after 19 months in prison. Haddad, 43, was the co-founder of the Islamic charity Global Relief Foundation, which the US government believed was channelling money to Al-Qaeda. Neither Haddad nor his charity were formally accused of any terrorism-related crime. After arriving at Beirut International Airport, Haddad was questioned by local authorities and released Wednesday. A judicial source said it was clear Haddad had no ties to Al-Qaeda, as he would not have been released if there were...

WASHINGTON: Despite having concrete evidence on the terrorist penetrations of several Islamic charities worldwide, the United States government apparently did not take any action, a 1996 CIA report made public now, reveals. "The Administration woke up to the contents of the report and started acting on it only after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington," the Wall Street Journal said in a reports. The issue is now under investigation by a special US Commission which is also probing possible involvement in terrorism by Saudi Arabian officials, the reports said. According to interviews with former intelligence...

Canada bankrolled man's aid agency during that time U.S. authorities have tied a Canadian aid worker to the al-Qaeda terrorist network as far back as 1988, almost a decade before the Canadian government cut off funding to his Ottawa-based Muslim charity. Evidence unsealed by a U.S. judge in Chicago shows Ahmed Said Khadr had dealings with senior al-Qaeda leaders while being financed by the Canadian International Development Agency. Although CIDA stopped giving aid money to Mr. Khadr in 1997 after he was arrested for allegedly bombing an embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, the documents allege he was working with al-Qaeda long...

BERN, Switzerland (AP) — Swiss authorities said Friday they had handed over bank documents to U.S. investigators tracking a Chicago-based Islamic charity that allegedly funneled money to al-Qaida. The Swiss Justice Ministry said it had passed records from a Zurich bank account to U.S. authorities earlier this week. The United States originally requested Swiss help in its investigation of the Benevolence International Foundation in April 2002. Some $1.4 million was transferred from the Zurich account to the foundation between June 2000 and September 2001 The U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of Benevolence International a year ago after its leader,...

SANNA (Reuters) - A Yemeni Islamic cleric arrested in Germany for suspected al Qaeda links has said he was lured to travel there to receive a charitable donation from a U.S. Muslim, a state-run newspaper said on Thursday. Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Mouyad, held along with an aide in Germany on a U.S. request last week, said he had been led to believe the U.S. Muslim man wanted to meet him to make a contribution, the September 26 weekly said. The cleric told Yemen's ambassador at a German detention center he had been told "he should travel to the United...

BERLIN (AP) — Police in southwestern Germany raided three Islamic organizations Friday suspected of forging passports and other papers for use in extremist activities. Several people were detained. Thomas Schaeuble, the top security official in Baden-Wuerttemberg state, said the raids were a preventive measure. Islamic extremists have been known to use false papers during trips to countries such as Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan, he said. ``There was concrete information that certain Islamic meeting places were used to supply people with false papers,'' he said. ``We have to assume that these people were using these forgeries in order to operate in...

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has acted to freeze the assets of an organisation suspected of raising funds to help Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terror network build a nuclear bomb. Financial institutions were ordered to freeze funds belonging to the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF) at midnight. BIF's chief executive Enaam Araout was recently indicted in the USA for operating it as a racketeering enterprise and providing material support to organisations including al-Qa'eda. "Strong evidence" existed to link BIF with al-Qa'eda and bin Laden, said the Treasury. This includes personal contacts between senior BIF officials and al-Qa'eda operatives involved in the 1998...

Network benefits from 'steady stream' of income, agency says WASHINGTON: (AP) Al-Qaida draws much of its income from contributions by a worldwide network of individuals and charities, including some in the United States, the CIA says. "The organization tries to raise funds from mosques, Islamic charities and individuals — rich and poor — throughout much of the world," a recently released CIA statement said. "This has helped corroborate our view that al-Qaida relies on a steady stream of contributions. statement THE CAPTURE of al-Qaida operatives and the dismantling of the group's camps and bases in Afghanistan has provided U.S. intelligence...

CHICAGO (AP) - A federal judge denied bail Tuesday to the head of an Islamic charity charged with perjury for denying government claims that his group supports terrorism or military activity. Enaam Arnaout, 40, head of Benevolence International Foundation, will remain in federal custody pending further action in his case, U.S. District Judge Joan Gottschall said. The judge acknowledged that evidence of possible links to terrorism is fragmentary. But she said that while the perjury charge would not send Arnaout to prison for long, the government has said it might bring terrorism charges requiring a sentence of more than 20...

One of the biggest banks in the Middle East is being hit by the US stance on terrorist funds, a report has said. Deposits at Saudi American Bank (Samba) fell by almost $600m (£410m) in the first three months of the year. The fall could be in protest against the Bush administration's ban on US banks accepting transactions from some Islamic charities believed to have connections with terrorism, according to the Financial Times. Samba is 22.8% owned by the US' Citibank, and is Saudi Arabia's second largest bank with 57 branches and 2,236 employees. Boycott Dwindling deposits is unusual at...

Rabih Haddad, a founder of an Islamic charity based in suburban Bridgeview, held meetings outside the U.S. more than a decade ago with members of terror groups linked to Al Qaeda, according to federal prosecutors. During his overseas trips, the Lebanese-born Haddad, who was arrested by immigration agents four months ago, was reportedly seen at facilities that housed and supported organizations tied to the terrorist network, government officials said. The accusations were contained in the more than 1,000 pages of documents from immigration court transcripts released Friday by the government. Their release came after a federal appeals court in Cincinnati...

CHICAGO -- A federal judge refused Friday to rule out secret evidence presented by the government in a lawsuit brought by an Islamic charity suspected of ties to terrorism. The government froze assets of the Global Relief Foundation on Dec. 14 and confiscated many of its records. More recently, the government has said the organization, based in suburban Bridgeview, has had communications with a former aide to Osama bin Laden. Global Relief wants U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen to force federal officials to lift the freeze tying up its money and give back its financial records. The charity denies having...