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CHICAGO: A federal judge in Illinois on Thursday approved a request for a trip to Disney World by a man who the government had once accused of aiding Palestinian militants, brushing aside prosecutors' claims that he may instead flee. "I'm confident that he will come back," U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve said in giving former Chicago grocer Muhammad Salah permission to make the trip to the Florida vacation spot.

Sheik Jamal Said stood before the packed mosque and worked the crowd like an auctioneer. Speaking Arabic, the prayer leader asked for a donation of $10,000. No one responded. He asked for $5,000, and three men raised their hands. < SNIP> The recipient of the worshipers' generosity was Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian activist accused by the U.S. government of aiding terrorists. And the prayer leader's passionate appeal is a reflection of the ascendancy of Muslim hard-liners at the mosque, one of the most outspoken and embattled in the U.S. The mosque did not become this way without a struggle. Relying...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Two suspected members of Hamas have been arrested in the United States and charged with supporting a foreign terrorist organization, money laundering and racketeering, US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced. The authorities have issued an arrest warrant for a third suspect facing the same charges, identified as the deputy chief of the political bureau of Hamas, Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, who currently resides in Syria. Ashcroft said the trio allegedly ran a US-based terrorist recruiting and financing cell linked with Hamas, a Palestinian militant group which has publicly admitted to many killings, primarily of Israelis but also...

Testimony in the trial of Chicago resident Muhammad Salah and Abdelhaleem al-Ashqar of Northern Virginia, continued yesterday. FBI Agents gave testimony focusing on items found in Ashqar's home during a search of his Oxford Mississippi residence on December 26, 1993, in addition to wiretaps of his phone and fax lines. Special Agent Bradley Benabidez testified that the FBI acquired over 2400 hours of audio during the year that they maintained a wiretap. Benabidez further described the December 1993 search of Ashqar’s home where a team of agents from the FBI photographed over 1600 documents. A few of those documents which...

CHICAGO Lawyers want to haul New York Times reporter Judith Miller into yet another federal courthouse, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday -- but this time the subject has nothing to do with Valerie Plame. Defense attorneys say the government should have the reporter take the stand in the case of Muhammad Salah, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was living in suburban Chicago when he was accused along with two other Palestinians of conspiring to funnel money to the Middle Eastern terrorist group Hamas. The defense wants to prevent the prosecution from using several alleged confessions in their case against Salah....

Abdelhaleem Ashqar is facing trial in Chicago, accused of funding terrorists, and is under house arrest in Virginia. But he said Thursday that won't keep him from seeking to replace Yasser Arafat as the next Palestinian leader. Proclaiming that he detests bloodshed, Ashqar said he will run in the Jan. 9 Palestinian election as an independent and was able to collect 7,000 to 8,000 election petition signatures in less than 36 hours from his district of Putulkarm, in the northern part of the West Bank. Under house arrest at his home in Alexandria, Va., the former Howard University professor said...

On Tuesday the federal authorities struck another serious blow against the toleration of Islamist terrorist activities on American soil, by arresting five former leaders of the so-called Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which, as I have previously argued, would be better called the Holy War Foundation.   HLF is, after all, a front for the Palestinian suicide terror gang Hamas, which is mainly funded by Saudi Arabia. < -snip- > HLF long functioned as the nerve center of the “Wahhabi lobby” in the U.S., headquartered in Texas, with branch offices in Paterson, N.J., Bridgeview, Ill., and San Diego.  Established...

Chicago Public Schools officials admitted Friday that they mistakenly allowed a Bridgeview man to work as a substitute teacher for 14 months after the FBI told them he had been convicted of financing terrorism in the Middle East. Muhammad Salah, who served nearly 5 years in prison in Israel and whose name is on a U.S. government list of terrorists, worked as a substitute teacher from January 2002 until March. Schools officials continued to give him substitute jobs even after FBI agents in April 2002 recommended that he not be permitted to continue teaching. "We had planned to stop using...