Is your ice cream money funding global jihad? “At dawn, armed FBI (website) agents assigned to an anti-terrorism unit converged on an unlikely front in the war on terrorism: a tiny ice cream shop in Brooklyn.”
They “arrested the Yemeni proprietor [Abad Elfgeeh], a naturalized U.S. citizen, who lived three floors above. Based on a tip, they said, they had learned that $20 million had passed through the bank accounts of his business from 1997 until the raid in January. . . . [P]rosecutors believe Elfgeeh was an associate of Sheik Mohammed Hasa Al-Moayad, a prominent Yemeni cleric charged with funneling millions to al-Qaida in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks.”
Elfgeeh denies this, but “Al-Moayad allegedly named four men in New York, including Elfgeeh, he claimed had secretly transferred funds to him in Yemen. He also ‘said he received money for “jihad” that was collected from the Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn,’ court papers said. Past investigations identified the mosque as a place of worship for terrorists, including the men who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Mosque leaders have dismissed any current connection.”
This ice cream shop operation is an example of the hawala money laundering system that radicals are using to great effect. “Osama bin Laden has boasted that hawalas created cracks in the Western financial system that ‘were as familiar to him and his al-Quaida colleagues as the lines of their own hands,’ a recent congressional report warned.”