(Washington Post) John Mintz and Douglas Farah - Authorities are quietly investigating more than 500 Muslim and Arab small businesses across the United States to determine whether they are dispatching money raised through criminal activity in the U.S. to terrorist groups overseas. The criminal activity includes skimming the profits of drug sales, stealing and reselling baby formula, illegally redeeming huge quantities of grocery coupons, collecting fraudulent welfare payments, swiping credit card numbers, and hawking unlicensed T-shirts. $20-30 million is raised annually through these scams, providing a substantial portion of the money that Middle Eastern terror groups spend annually, authorities said. Investigators suspect that some of the money has gone to Palestinian groups that use suicide bombings to kill Israeli civilians, including the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, federal officials said. Senior U.S. officials said they are concerned that the inquiry might be seen as ethnic profiling but are simply going where leads take them. A cigarette smuggling ring in North Carolina also arranged for the delivery of military equipment, such as mine detection gear, blasting equipment and night-vision goggles, to Hizballah. Arab gangs in Canada truck millions of tablets of pseudoephedrine into the U.S. where it is sold to Mexican gangs that use it to manufacture methamphetamine, officials said. Authorities have tracked $10 million in the gang's profits to the Middle East, tracing a portion of that money to accounts that are used by Hizballah, officials said.
2002-08-12 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive