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The ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning when federal agents arrested two men at Kennedy Airport who were found with more than $140,000 hidden in cardboard boxes with honey jars bound for Yemen. For the agents, aware that terrorists were said to use honey shipments to hide money, that slender lead could not be ignored. If the world was suddenly different for everybody back then, in October 2001, with federal agents and prosecutors both properly alarmed and also under sudden pressure to make terrorism cases, they still relied on old techniques developed in generations of Mafia and...

NEW YORK (AP) - An FBI informant who set himself on fire in front of the White House played a role in at least three terror investigations, court documents show. Defense attorneys said Wednesday they are re-examining Mohamed Alanssi's role in the cases against their clients, who are accused of helping fund Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida and the Palestinian group Hamas. "Ultimately what I'm heading for is a motion for dismissal," said Frank Hancock, the lawyer for Abad Elfgeeh, a Yemeni-born man accused of illegally sending millions of dollars overseas. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf, who filed the...

New York City-Based 'charity' Eyed in Terror Money Probe Feb. 26, 2004 By Tom Hays / Associated Press Writer NEW YORK (AP) - When Sheik Abdullah Satar visited mosques in Brooklyn and Manhattan in the waning days of 1999, the FBI was watching. An outspoken cleric and political figure in Yemen, Satar was put under 24-hour surveillance amid fears about possible terrorist attacks on New Year's Eve. The sheik was never arrested or charged with a crime. But five years later, his name has resurfaced in an investigation of the Brooklyn branch of an obscure charity - its address a...

NEW YORK - (KRT) - A prominent Yemeni cleric is suspected of raising money for terrorists at a Muslim charity and several mosques in Brooklyn, it was disclosed yesterday. An FBI agent pulled back the veil on a secret investigation of Sheikh Abdullah Satar at the trial of an associate who is charged with lying about the cleric's activities. The agent, Brian Murphy, said in Brooklyn Federal Court that Satar was under surveillance during a fund-raising swing through Brooklyn in early 2000. At the time, the feds were conducting an investigation into the financing of terrorist groups. After Satar -...

prominent Yemeni sheik came to Brooklyn in 1999, raised money at mosques that was ostensibly for charity and then went to Italy, where he met with a top operative of Al Qaeda, according to federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.The sheik, Abdullah Satar, then made a speech in Italy calling upon people to join the jihad and denounced the United States for pursuing a terrorism suspect "to curry favor with the Jewish population and to project hatred upon Muslims,'' according to testimony of an F.B.I. agent at a trial of a New Jersey man in Federal District Court in Brooklyn that...