Free Republic

SEATTLE - A federal grand jury in Seattle indicted 12 people in an alleged international money-laundering scheme that funneled more than $12 million to Iraq. The indictment, handed up Wednesday and unsealed Thursday, alleges that between April 2000 and January 2002, a ring of agents throughout the United States collected money domestically and sent it to a company called Alshafei Family Connect in suburban Edmonds. The company, owned and principally operated by Hussein Alshafei, an Iraqi native and naturalized U.S. citizen, then shipped the money to London and other overseas cities and eventually to Iraq, the indictment alleges. The actions...

Federal agents yesterday raided the home and business of an Iraqi American man who has claimed that Bank of America discriminated against him by trying to close his account because of post-Sept. 11 terrorist concerns. Hussain Alshafei of Edmonds settled with the bank Wednesday. In a twist surely unforeseen by Alshafei, however, the publicized filing of the federal civil rights suit also sparked an investigation by the U.S. Customs Service, which searched his home and Mountlake Terrace wire-transfer business yesterday. Authorities claim that by wiring more than $14 million in two of the past three years to Jordan and other ...

Ansar al-Islam prepares for suicide attacks DUBAI: The militant movement Ansar al-Islam, which Washington links to Al Qaeda and has attacked repeatedly in Iraqi Kurdistan during the war, has redeployed and is preparing suicide attacks against coalition forces, a statement on an Islamist webpage said on Monday. The statement signed by “the Ansar al-Islam commmand” said that “after the air strikes on its bases in northern Iraq by the Crusader invaders, it has decided to move the bases of the mujahideen so as not to be a direct target of air attacks. “Our bases in northern Iraq were completely evacuated...