Jerusalem - A U.S. court decision allowing victims of Palestinian suicide bombings to sue a major Mideast bank is a "great step" forward in the war against terrorism, Israeli victims said Wednesday.
U.S. District Court Judge Nina Gershon ruled this week that terror victims can sue the Arab Bank for its role in transferring Saudi funds to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. According to their attorneys, several thousand plaintiffs who have joined the case include 30 U.S. citizens, as well as citizens of Israel, Russia, France and eight other countries.
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http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200701/FOR20070131e.html
Senior Jihad Terrorist Nabbed in Shechem (Israel)
Feb 01, '07
The IDF arrested a senior Islamic Jihad fugitive Wednesday night in Samaria. Nasser Jubara of Nablus had been involved in terror activity against the IDF and planning of suicide bombings in Israel.
According to the IDF spokesman, Jubara had served 4 years in jail after being convicted of terror activity in the Shechem area. Immediately upon his release in 2006 he returned to terror activities and renewed his connection to the Islamic Jihad Command in Syria.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=120699
ONE of Australia's best-known Islamic colleges has been raided by police and government investigators on suspicion its three campuses have rorted the student subsidies payable for non-government schools. The Australian Islamic College's campuses at Kewdale in Perth's south and Dianella and Thornlie in the city's north were raided at 9am (ACDT) yesterday by 28 fraud squad officers and 10 investigators from the Federal Department of Education, Science and Training investigations unit.
The officers took three truck- loads of computers and documents from the college campuses and the college's headquarters in the southern Perth suburb of Booragoon. The raids followed an investigation of several months into the school's use of student subsidised funding programs by the Commercial Crime Division. The Federal Government gave the college $13.3 million in funding in 2006.
It is possible for schools and colleges to make fraudulent subsidy claims by "double counting" students, "ghosting" students or inflating rent payments. "You can do all sorts of things hypothetically (to rort the subsidy system)," Detective Inspector Arno Albrecht, from the Commercial Crime Division, said He said that as far as he was aware, the Major Fraud Squad had not been involved in a raid on a school in the state before. The Australian Islamic College has 2000 students from kindergarten through to Year 12 across its three campuses, which are staffed by 250 teachers.
The founder and current director and administrator of the college, Abdallah Magar, refused to comment on the raids. Mr Magar founded the school in 1986. "The outcome of this environment would be full academic achievement, protection from social diseases coupled with success in the Hereafter by being saved from the hellfire," he said. In November last year, it was one of 35 signatories to a letter accusing the media of hysteria and sensationalism in reports on Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali's comments likening scantily clad women to uncovered meat.
An internal investigator last year accused Australia's peak Islamic council of funding its activities with public money siphoned off from a non-profit Muslim school. The Sydney-based accounting firm Worrells was commissioned to prepare a report on the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils' finances after members raised concerns about theuse of funds within the federation. The resulting report alleged AFIC was artificially inflating rents to milk federal and state government funds from the popular Malek Fahd school in western Sydney.
AFIC charged the school $900,000 a year in rent for the 3.62ha property, up from $418,750 in 2000 and $67,500 in 1999. In March last year the property, zoned general rural, had an unimproved land value recorded by the Bankstown Council of $3 million - leading to an annual average rental return of about $240,000. AFIC also bills the school for accounting fees, cleaning costs and other charges, which provide two-thirds of AFIC's budget of more than $2 million a year.
The school receives $11 million a year from the federal Government on condition the funds are used only for educational purposes and the school only uses surplus profits for its own activities.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,21145215-5005941,00.html