From the Seattle Times, with thanks to EPG:
Federal counter-terrorism agents swept down on homes and businesses in Seattle yesterday, conducting searches and charging 13 men with gun, immigration and bank-fraud violations….
None of the men targeted in the raids is accused under terrorism statutes. However, the federal charges unsealed yesterday allege the ringleader of the bank-fraud case told a paid FBI informant that his “whole Muslim crew” was involved in stealing money because “you can’t go to war broke.”
According to the complaint, the purported ringleader, a drug felon named Karim Abdullah Assalaam, told an acquaintance that the money obtained through the fraud “goes to help our Muslim brothers and sisters. … It goes to the cause, not like it goes to me and you.”
However, the complaint alleges that his half-brother, Attawwaab Muhammad Fard, who is also charged, used some of the money to buy a used Lexus. “There was a lot of jihad talk,” said one highly placed federal law-enforcement official familiar with the case. “But most of the money went into their pockets.”…
Several gun-related cases also sprang from the investigation. Assalaam and four other men were charged as felons possessing firearms, including several handguns, two shotguns and an AK-47 assault rifle.
In one instance, federal agents had reported “unusual activity” at a shooting range in Renton involving one of the men apparently teaching a group of individuals how to shoot.
In a related case in King County Superior Court, prosecutors in October filed assault and extortion charges against some individuals associated with an Islamic religious school run out of a South Seattle barbershop. The school was “training children … in Anti American rhetoric,” and “how to shoot and fight the Americans,” according to court documents.
The owner of a restaurant downstairs from the Crescent Cuts barbershop on Rainier Avenue South told police that he had been asked to participate in the bank-fraud scheme. When he refused, he said, he was assaulted by a group of individuals and beaten with a meat tenderizer.
He described the school in court documents as “an anti-American training ground for Muslims.”