Newly released information on the cash trail links the former USF professor to a global coalition of terrorist-controlled companies.
By Associated Press
Published October 19, 2003
TAMPA - A former University of South Florida professor awaiting trial on charges he raised money for terrorists was part of an elaborate international network designed to conceal the funding, a federal investigator says in a newly released court document.
The document also links Sami Al-Arian to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Islamic spiritual leader considered the inspiration behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
The new information comes from a 101-page affidavit written to support a government request for a warrant to search 14 properties in Virginia and a poultry business in Georgia in March 2002.
Portions of the affidavit pertaining to Al-Arian, who is awaiting trial on federal racketeering and conspiracy charges, were released three months ago after a lengthy court fight by the Tampa Tribune and the New York Times.
But the rest of the document was kept secret until Friday, when the judge ordered nearly all the rest of it unsealed on motions from the Tribune, the New York Times and Dow Jones Inc., parent company of the Wall Street Journal.
Al-Arian was fired from his job as a USF computer science professor after his arrest in February.
He is scheduled to stand trial in January 2005 and will act as his own attorney.
Three other men will stand trial with him. Four other alleged conspirators live abroad and have not been arrested.
Customs agent David Kane wrote in 2002 that the funding network that Al-Arian allegedly took part in used "a convoluted web of multiple transactions" by a network of companies, trusts and charities to hide money going to two militant Palestinian groups: Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The suspect organizations were part of the Safa Group, "a complex coalition of overlapping companies in northern Virginia controlled by individuals who have shown support for terrorists or terrorist fronts," the affidavit states. Kane also wrote that Rahman visited Al-Arian's home and spoke at his Tampa mosque.
Rahman is serving life in prison after being convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up other New York landmarks and tunnels.
In the portions of the affidavit released previously, the government alleged that Al-Arian organized the Palestinian Islamic Jihad from his home in Tampa and might have written its violent manifesto.
Agents found the document, which terrorism experts didn't know existed, on Al-Arian's home computer in a raid in 1995.
The newly released sections of the affidavit allege a wider web of connections between a number of the people in Al-Arian's circle and those running the Safa Group.
It also alleges links between these people and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
Kane contends the Safa Group organizations moved huge sums through multilayered financial transactions and to accounts in banks on the Isle of Man, a tax haven in the English Channel.
From there, he surmised, the money must have been moved, but the island's tight bank secrecy laws thwarted investigators.
"The evidence to date demonstrates that multiple millions of dollars have been moved between the SAFA Charities, between the for-profit members of the SAFA Group and the SAFA Charities, and between the SAFA Charities and foreign entities represented to be charitable in nature," Kane wrote in documents made public late Friday.
He said he had probable cause to believe the reason SAFA Charities existed was to hide the distribution of money to terrorist groups, principally Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the Islamic Resistance movement.
An attorney for the Islamic groups said the fact that the money trail reaches a dead-end at an overseas bank is a fatal flaw in Kane's argument.
The government doesn't have proof that the money went to terrorists and simply assumes it to be true without evidence, she said.
Nancy Luque, a Washington attorney and former federal prosecutor who represents Safa, had argued against releasing the affidavit.
"What Kane does is, "I can't figure out where this money went, so because they're Muslim, I'm going to say it must be for terrorism,' " she said Saturday.
"This affidavit would maybe support an inquiry into tax matters, but it doesn't support any allegation of terrorism. For people to just assume Al-Arian's guilt, and then to assume the guilt of people who associated with him 10 years, to smear them like that is just un-American."
Luque said there is "no such thing as the Safa group" and that the name came from a book by Rita Katz, author of Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America.
Luque said there is a Safa Trust, which donates to Islamic causes, such as publishing religious texts and training Muslim clerics.
"The contributions that were referenced in the affidavit were made at the time Al-Arian was a professor at USF, not under any cloud of suspicion or investigation," she said. "And they were made to groups that were associated with supporting education and Muslim outreach activities in the United States that were never intended to support terrorism."
The indictment against al-Arian accuses him of being the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and secretary of its central advisory committee, the Shura Council.
In that role, he is alleged to have overseen the organization's property and money, funneling to the group funds that were used to carry out suicide bombings and terrorist attacks in Israel that killed two Americans.
- Times staff writer Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler contributed to this report.
