Posted on 03/21/2003 1:12:57 AM PST by sarcasm
Although federal agents have arrested one University of Idaho student suspected of being at the center of what investigators say is a key fund-raising arm of al-Qaida, another Idaho student who also allegedly played a pivotal role eluded investigators last year.
Federal criminal justice sources say Abdullah Aljughaiman returned to his native Saudi Arabia last summer after learning of the investigation.
Like Sami Al Hussayen, who was arrested late last month in Moscow, Idaho, Aljughaiman sits at the center of a complex web of money men and purported Islamic charities that fund al-Qaida, agents say.
Within the next few days, a former University of Idaho football player who was a roommate of Aljughaiman or Al Hussayen and received more than $20,000 from them, will be returned to Idaho from Washington, D.C. He will be held as a material witness in the investigation, which agents hope may make clear how operations such as the Sept. 11 attacks are funded.
Abdullah Al-Kidd, formerly known as Lavoni T. Kidd, was arrested Sunday at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., just before boarding a flight to Saudi Arabia. Al-Kidd had a one-way ticket.
Al-Kidd was a standout athlete at Renton's Lindbergh High School. He later converted to Islam.
He was living in Seattle last summer when he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that FBI agents had questioned him. At the time, the Post-Intelligencer did not name him because authorities had neither charged him with a crime nor taken him into custody as a material witness.
Al-Kidd said agents visited him three or four times since his return in April from a lengthy trip to Yemen. He said he studied Islamic law and learned Arabic in Yemen. Tribal leaders with close ties to al-Qaida control much of that rugged country.
"The FBI wanted to know what I was doing in Yemen, why I was there during the Sept. 11 period," he said.
Since their initial contacts with Al-Kidd, federal agents have been expanding their investigation, fanning out from Washington State University and the University of Idaho to locations around the nation and the world to track down and interview the scores of people associated with both Aljughaiman and Al Hussayen.
Extensive electronic surveillance reveals that both men "had contacts with people that are al-Qaida and al-Qaida associates . . . people we would consider very significant in UBL's arena," a federal criminal justice source said this week. UBL is a law enforcement acronym for Osama bin Laden.
So far Al Hussayen, a graduate student with a wife and several children, is facing charges of visa fraud that have little to do with terrorism. But the source said a superceding indictment charging him with providing material support to terrorists is likely. At the heart of the issue is whether two purported Islamic charities, Help The Needy and the Islamic Assembly of North America, are conduits of cash to terrorists.
"I don't think we've got to the bottom of it yet," said Chip Burrus, special agent in charge of the FBI Salt Lake City division.
Al Hussayen "had a lot of contacts in the United States, and we are in the process of chasing those down. Supercedings (indictments) are clearly possible, but that determination hasn't been made yet."
Agents find it compelling that Al Hussayen's uncle, Saleh Abdel Rahman Al-Hussayen, traveled from Saudi Arabia to the United States, and just a few days before Sept.11, 2001, "stayed in the same hotel in the Herndon, Va., area as three of the Sept. 11 hijackers of Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon," according to court documents and sources.
That matter remains under investigation but is hampered by the uncle's having left the United States. Agents also face a challenge in pursuing information on Aljughaiman, who they believe is still in Saudi Arabia.
Aljughaiman was a lecturer at the teachers college in Moscow and holds a master's degree in religious education from King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He has a particular interest in Islamic education and published a paper on how to teach Islamic studies in elementary schools.
His Internet home page contains a link to the Islamic Assembly of North America.
With both Aljughaiman and Al Hussayen's uncle in Saudi Arabia, investigators are all the more reliant on information from such people as Al-Kidd, who told the Post-Intelligencer last summer that FBI agents wanted him to identify people tied to terrorist networks or ideologies, as well as to talk about fund raising.
He named Help the Needy as an Islamic charity for which money was being raised. Signs advertising the group were on display in the mosques in Moscow and Pullman last summer.
The organization was established in 1993 and is headquartered in a suburb of Syracuse, N.Y. The group's Web site says it provides food, clothes and lodging for orphans and families as well as medicines for hospitals.
Federal agents raided the organization's office and other locations around Syracuse last month. An indictment charges the organization and four people with conspiring to illegally transfer money to Iraq as well as money laundering.
Another person being held as a material witness in the Idaho and Washington investigation is former WSU student Ismail Diab, who had been a Palouse-area representative for Help the Needy. He told the Post-Intelligencer last summer that Help the Needy provides assistance to "the most needy people on Earth, the Iraqi children," who he said have suffered greatly since the imposition of the United Nations economic embargo on the country.
Last year, he said, the group raised at least $450,000 from Muslims in the United States, and donated it to Iraq in the form of food.
But the money was sent to help suffering people, not the government, he said.
Diab, 51, said he was not aware of any money raised for the group ending up in the hands of terrorists. "How can you put yourself in that situation, where you know it's illegal?"
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