Posted on 03/31/2004 11:20:18 AM PST by Dbdaily
NEW YORK - A New York Jewish diamond dealer pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that he unwittingly handled a $30,000 payment for smugglers of a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile who intended to shoot down U.S. airliners.
Yehuda Abraham, 76, could be fined up to $250,000 and sentenced to up to five years in prison for operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, according to the U.S. Attorney in Newark, New Jersey.
Abraham was arrested last August in an FBI sting operation that also netted a British arms dealer charged with trying to sell the missile to an FBI informant at a hotel near the Newark International Airport.
Abraham told a U.S. District Court judge in Newark, New Jersey, that he had received $30,000 from the informant who had agreed to buy the missile. He said he did not know and did not ask what the $30,000 payment was to be used for when he accepted it at his business office in New York in October 2002, and wired the payment to a bank in Hong Kong.
Abraham told Judge Katharine Hayden that he had been prepared to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in a separate arms smuggling deal with the same people without knowing that it involved arms.
He will be sentenced on July 19 and remains in custody, along with Moinudden Ahmed Hameed, whom prosecutors describe as another financial middleman who did not know he was involved in transactions involving illegal weapons.
Prosecutors said Hameed, who is charged with conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, arrived from Malaysia as part of the alleged planned sale of 50 more missiles. They said he and Abraham were to collect an initial payment of about $500,000 from the informant.
The arms dealer, Hemant Lakhani, 69, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he tried to sell the shoulder-fired missile. Prosecutors have added charges that he offered to procure anti-aircraft guns, tanks, armored personnel carriers, radar systems and a "dirty bomb."
Prosecutors have not provided details of the "dirty bomb" charge, but the term is usually used to describe a device designed to spread radioactive or chemical agents.
The prosecutor, U.S. attorney Christopher Christie, has described Lakhani as an arms dealer who wanted Americans to be attacked and killed. U.S. authorities said Russian officials had cooperated with their international investigation into arms smuggling.
Lakhani's lawyer, Henry Klingeman, has said his client was "not a terrorist" but a businessman who had traded in women's clothing from London for 40 years, and was drawn into conversations about weapons with an FBI informant.
If evidence shows that he knew what the money was for - he should be tried for treason.
Blatant anti-Semitism is accepted in the news wires now I guess.
We are headed somewhere very bad - very fast.
Perhaps you are confusing wholesale businesses with retail businesses?
Jeweler Pleads Guilty to Handling Missile Money
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York diamond dealer pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that he unwittingly handled a $30,000 payment for smugglers of a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile who intended to shoot down U.S. airliners.
Haaretz online altered it, some anti-semites, huh?
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