ETROIT, July 24 — A Jordanian-American arrested last week at the airport here with $12 million in fraudulent checks was held without bond today after federal prosecutors said he had offered to tell them about terrorism and had access to large sums of money.
Prosecutors also said that when he was stopped the man, Omar Shishani, 47, was carrying handwritten passages from the Koran that referred to genocide and martyrdom.
On Tuesday, Mr. Shishani was charged with possession of a counterfeit security and smuggling merchandise into the United States. In a federal court hearing today, his lawyer entered a plea of not guilty. Mr. Shishani, born in Jordan, is of Chechen descent. He told investigators that he once worked for the Jordanian intelligence service, prosecutors said in documents filed today.
Prosecutors said Mr. Shishani had told them that a man whose name is on six of the nine fraudulent checks, Baharuddin Masse, could belong to Al Qaeda and had "made pro-Al Qaeda statements," according to the documents. Mr. Shishani also said Mr. Masse had named his daughter Al Qaeda, prosecutors said.
When Mr. Shishani was asked whether he knew anything about terrorism, prosecutors said, he replied, "If you want to know about terrorism, I can help you with that."
Mr. Shishani's lawyer, Nabih Ayad, said Mr. Masse was a business associate of his client in Indonesia but denied that Mr. Shishani had told investigators anything about terrorist activity.
"There's all this smoke, Your Honor, about all these items," Mr. Ayad told Federal Magistrate Thomas A. Carlson today. "It's as if no one can commit a crime these days without being linked to terrorism."
Mr. Ayad also said his client did not know that the nine checks he carried back from Indonesia, reportedly forged on stationery from Westamerica Bank of California, were fake.
Mr. Ayad added that Mr. Masse had asked Mr. Shishani to return the checks to an unnamed business associate in California after a business deal had fallen through. Mr. Shishani agreed, the lawyer said, and was stopped at the airport with the checks in his luggage.
Mr. Ayad said his client was a broker who acted as a middleman, arranging deals between businessmen and financiers, though prosecutors said Mr. Shishani had told them he had not closed a deal in four years.
An assistant United States attorney, Eric Straus, said investigators who searched his house in Dearborn found a bank statement from December 2000 that indicated that Mr. Shishani's net worth was nearly $37 million, mostly in antiques.
The prosecution's case also included a translation of a verse from the Koran that was written on a piece of paper Mr. Shishani was carrying. The translation reads, "When We decide to destroy a population We (first) send a definite order to those among them who are given the good things of this life and yet transgress . . . then We destroy them utterly."
Public records indicate that Mr. Shishani founded Shojoma Trading and Consulting Inc. in 1993. Mr. Ayad said the company built computers, but did not elaborate. Shojoma closed in 1996.
Records also show that Mr. Shishani petitioned for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1991 while he was living in San Francisco.
Mr. Shishani's case has prompted federal investigators in Las Vegas to re-examine a similar check-fraud case there for ties to terrorism. A detailed complaint filed in federal court in Las Vegas says seven men doctored $800,000 worth of Westamerica checks and tried to pass them to an undercover federal agent.
The checks, almost identical to the ones Mr. Shishani was carrying, were labeled "cashier's check" instead of "official check" and were listed as being from the bank's Pomona, Calif., branch. No such branch exists.