Posted on 01/28/2008 10:03:16 PM PST by Sammy67
Local Store Owner Sentenced by Jim Aroune Published Jan 28, 2008
A Rochester store owner will be confined to his home for six months for illegally sending money to Yemen.
Mohamed Muthana received this sentence Monday.
A jury convicted Muthana of running an illegal money transmitting business out of the Yemeny Superette on North Street.
More than $60,000 headed to Yemen from there. Muthana will also serve three years probation and pay a fine.
Confined to his home?
They should burn him at the stake.
Store located in Rochester N.Y.
1) Who received the cash?
2) What's his residency satus?
Too bad Martha Stewart didn’t send money to terrorists. She could have avoided all that time in prison.
Oh, I’ll bet he’ll never do this again. /s
How about confining him to Yemen and burning his home. That's how I'd vote!
Yumpin yeminy
is it illegal to send money to yemen?
if it is i'm in the wrong. if it isn't, what the article doesn't say is what, exactly, he did wrong.
from the laconic article -i would say nothing i can see.
Sounds like an item for Flamethrower.tv’s weekly “What would Mohammed do?” item.
Democrat and Chronicle by: Michael Zeigler
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Three Yemeni men who run Rochester groceries are accused of illegally sending money overseas in the belief it would benefit the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
Yehia Ali Ahmed Alomari, 26; Mohamed Al Huraibi, 49; and Saleh Mohamed Taher Saeed, 27, were scheduled to appear for a detention hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Marian W. Payson.
Q and A: How much of a threat is Hezbollah?
But the hearing was postponed for one week for Huraibi and two weeks for Alomari and Saeed to allow their lawyers to investigate whether the defendants’ families can present property to secure their release from custody.
Federal agents who conducted a sting operation charged Alomari, Huraibi and Saeed with conspiring to launder money and laundering monetary instruments for allegedly transferring $200,000 outside the United States after being told the money had been generated by illegal activities and was intended for Hezbollah.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Hezbollah | Hezbollah movement | Islamic group | Rochester | Yemeni
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bret A. Puscheck said none of the money actually made it to Hezbollah, a radical Islamic group the U.S. Department of State designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.
The transferred money was deposited in overseas accounts controlled by the federal government.
Saeed’s lawyer, James J. Rizzo, said his client provides a valuable service to Yemeni immigrants by sending money they earn in the U.S. to relatives still in Yemen.
“My client thinks it’s a misunderstanding, that he did somebody a favor and that no good deed is going unpunished.”
The men were arrested in late February after a sealed complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in Rochester.
The complaint, filed by a senior special agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the three were arrested after a two-year investigation that included the use of a confidential witness and an undercover agent.
Unsealed court documents said the investigation was triggered when investigators learned Saeed’s Social Security number was used in 324 currency transfers totaling $12.3 million from October 2002 through November 2004 and Alomari’s Social Security number was used to transfer $2.6 million during the same time period.
The confidential witness, a Yemeni who has since been granted U.S. citizenship, established trust with the three store owners and later brought in the undercover agent, who is of Lebanese ancestry and speaks fluent Arabic, according to court documents.
Alomari, Huraibi and Saeed didn’t object when the confidential witness and the undercover agent said they wanted to send money overseas to help Hezbollah, Puscheck said.
“The fact that they thought the money was going to Hezbollah did not deter them from continuing with these illegal transactions,” he said.
If convicted, Alomari, Huraibi and Saeed could be imprisoned up to 20 years and fined $250,000. They also could be deported.
U.S. Attorney Terrence P. Flynn said the arrests were the result of an investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a group of federal, state and local agencies.
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