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The Associated Press reported this week that a Saudi cleric, Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, funneled money to an Egyptian, Rabei Osman Ahmed, who is said to be the mastermind of the Madrid train bombings last March. Al-Awdah's name has been repeatedly linked to al-Qaeda and bin Laden, yet since 9-11, he has tempered his rhetoric. The disparity between his public and his covert activity can be explained by a secret agreement between the Saudi regime and al-Adwah's Movement for Islamic Resurgence.Osman Ahmed's Milan apartment was reportedly wiretapped by Italian anti-terrorism police. In one taped conversation he is reported to say that...

The Associated Press reported this week that a Saudi cleric, Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, funneled money to an Egyptian, Rabei Osman Ahmed, who is said to be the mastermind of the Madrid train bombings last March.Osman Ahmed's Milan apartment was reportedly wiretapped by Italian anti-terrorism police. To avoid tarnishing the country's image even more, Bin Laden's friends agreed to keep a low profile and the regime promised to tolerate their presence. In one taped conversation he is reported to say that "The Madrid attack is my project." He is also recorded saying that al-Awdah is "everything, everything." In a May 26...

A second man with ties to the University of Idaho has been arrested by federal agents in a widening investigation of a suspected terrorist-related web in the Moscow, Idaho-Pullman, Wash., area, an FBI source confirmed today. Former Idaho student Bassem K. Khafagi was arrested in January at the Marriott Hotel near New York City’s LaGuardia Airport and was returned to Michigan to face bank fraud charges, court documents show. A total of four men with ties to the Moscow-Pullman area and the Michigan-based Islamic Assembly of North America have been implicated in the investigation. They include current University of Idaho...

MADRID A Saudi cleric funneled money to an Egyptian suspected of being one of the masterminds of the Madrid train bombings in March, Spanish and Italian newspapers reported Thursday. The Egyptian suspect, Rabei Osman Ahmed, arrested in Milan in June on a request from the Spanish authorities, identified Sheik Salman al-Awdah, a former university professor in Saudi Arabia, as his financier while he was living in Spain between 2001 and 2003, El Mundo of Spain and Corriere della Sera of Italy said in a joint report. The March 11 train bombings killed 191 people and have been attributed to Islamic...

Even as war rages in Iraq, federal agents have begun to unlock the secrets of an unlicensed, unregistered Islamic charity in upstate New York that allegedly pumped millions of dollars into Baghdad. Flouting U.S. economic sanctions, the group shipped cash out of Syracuse, laundered it in banks in Jordan and then illegally funneled it into Iraq, according to an unsealed federal indictment. Operating under the name Help the Needy, the organization described itself as a tax-exempt nonprofit that provided food and humanitarian assistance to the "starving children and suffering Muslims of Iraq." But it lacked charitable status, misrepresented itself in...