Muslim Group, Leader Charged: Ill.-based charity linked to Bin Laden

Muslim Group, Leader Charged: Ill.-based charity linked to Bin Laden


John Mintz and Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Wednesday, May 01, 2002

CHICAGO, April 30 -- A large Muslim charity based in Illinois has been intimately connected to Osama bin Laden for years, moving large sums of money to fund the operations of his al Qaeda network around the world, authorities alleged in court papers today.

A portrait of terror connections emerged in an indictment that charges the Benevolence International Foundation and its longtime executive director, Enaam Arnaout, with perjury. The accusations stem from sworn court statements that Arnaout made recently in which he denied that he and his group had ever provided aid to bin Laden or any other terrorists.

U.S. officials said they filed charges against Arnaout and the $4-million-a-year charity today because they feared that Arnaout was planning to flee the country.

A 35-page FBI affidavit outlining the case provides some of the most compelling details of the subterfuges employed to conceal the movement of alleged terrorist cash across international borders. It also alleges that the organization had contacts with terror operatives who tried to obtain weapons of mass destruction for al Qaeda.

"Various persons involved in terrorist activities, specifically including persons trying to obtain chemical and nuclear weapons on behalf of al Qaeda, have had contacts with [Benevolence] offices and personnel," FBI Agent Robert Walker alleges in the affidavit.

Arnaout's lawyer, Matthew Piers, said his client's arrest today is part of the government's continued "heavy-handed" treatmentof the charity. "We are extremely dismayed by the government's conduct not only today but throughout the investigation," Piers said.

The government's affidavit alleges that the affiliation between the Benevolence foundation and bin Laden was demonstrated in 1998, when a top bin Laden associate, Mamdouh Salim, traveled to Bosnia using documents signed by Arnaout that described Salim as a director of the organization, officials said.

Salim, who is awaiting trial in New York on charges of conspiring to kill Americans in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, pleaded guilty last month to the attempted murder of a New York prison guard whom he had stabbed in the eye with a sharpened comb.

"Arnaout has a relationship with Osama bin Laden and many of his key associates dating back more than a decade," Walker says. Benevolence "is an organization that al Qaeda has used for logistical support" and for transferring funds, he alleges.

Arnaout was ordered held without bond after a hearing here today. A preliminary hearing on the case will be held on Tuesday.

Arnaout, 39, and his group were charged after he made two sworn statements in recent weeks. They included assertions that Benevolence had "never provided aid or support to people or organizations known to be engaged in violence, terrorist activities or military operations of any nature."

Arnaout made the statements in a lawsuit filed by the group in January challenging the U.S. Treasury's seizure of the group's assets a month earlier on the grounds that the charity aided bin Laden.

But the FBI affidavit lays out in meticulous detail its findings that a tight connection exits between bin Laden and Benevolence, citing information provided by a number of unidentified al Qaeda associates; documents and computer disks seized in raids of the group's offices in Bosnia last month; and other papers taken in a search of its suburban Chicago headquarters in December.

A "reliable" former al Qaeda member cooperating with the government said that "several al Qaeda members held positions" in Benevolence and that it was "one of the organizations utilized by al Qaeda" to move money, the FBI document says. The source told the FBI that such funds are "untraceable" because the charity fabricates records showing that the money is used to feed the poor or build mosques.

The FBI cites another unnamed source who said that in 1989, while living in Pakistan, Arnaout picked up one of bin Laden's wives at the airport and took her to his home, from where bin Laden and his bodyguards picked her up a week later. The source said that "if Arnaout had not been a trusted associate" of bin Laden, he would not have been entrusted with the task.

Arnaout helped transfer money and equipment -- at times including weapons -- for militant Muslim movements in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, including some tied to bin Laden, the FBI says. Photographs found at Benevolence offices in Bosnia show him with rifles, a rocket and an antiaircraft gun.

A bin Laden aide named Mohamed Bayazid, who tried to obtain uranium as part of al Qaeda's efforts to develop a nuclear weapon, listed Benevolence's Illinois address as his residence in securing a driver's license, the FBI affidavit says.

Benevolence was founded in the 1980s by a wealthy Saudi national, Sheik Adil Abdul Galil Batargy, who the FBI document identifies as a bin Laden associate. The group set up shop in the Chicago suburb of Palos Hills in 1993, when Batargy transferred control of the group to the Syrian-born Arnaout, the FBI says.

Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney in Chicago, said that agents acted today because Arnaout was considered "a risk of flight." Last month, an FBI source reported to agents that Arnaout had discussed with him the idea of fleeing to Saudi Arabia.

Piers denied that his client was about to flee.