Free Republic

Queen City Cigarettes & Candy, a Clinton Street warehouse owned by food broker Mohamed T. Albanna, is one element of investigators' picture of a money-transmitting business that sent large sums to Yemen. A leader of Lackawanna's Yemeni-American community and two other men were in custody today on charges they operated an illegal money-transmitting business that sent funds from Western New York to Yemen. Mohamed T. Albanna, vice president of the American Muslim Council of Western New York and a frequent spokesman for the defendants known as the "Lackawanna Six," appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Hugh B. Scott on Tuesday after...

The U.S. citizen killed by a missile launched from a pilotless drone aircraft over Yemen was the ringleader of an alleged terrorist sleeper cell in Lackawanna, N.Y., administration officials said yesterday. Kamal Derwish, one of two unindicted co-conspirators in the Lackawanna case, died along with the intended target of the attack, senior al Qaeda leader Abu Ali al-Harithi, who is accused of masterminding the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors died. These two men and four others were traveling in a car outside the Yemeni capital of Sanaa when they were hit by a Hellfire...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Three relatives of a man accused of belonging to an al-Qaida terror cell in the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna were arrested Tuesday and charged with illegally operating a money transferring business. Investigators have been unable to trace any of the money to terrorist activities, said U.S. Attorney Michael Battle. Mohamed Albanna, 51, a leader in the area's Yemeni community and an uncle of a man still being hunted by U.S. authorities, was seized by Customs and Drug Enforcement Administration agents in the doorway of his Buffalo store, the Queen City Cigarettes and Candy Co. His younger brother,...