Drugs, Al Qaeda, FARC, and arming the rebels

Mounting evidence suggests that weapons given to Libyan militants in the rebellion against Qaddafi were subsequently leveraged to purchase cocaine from FARC for follow-on distribution to the same European countries that helped arm the rebels in the first place.  No lessons will be learned from this fiasco, as it’s full steam ahead with the same players arming Syrian rebels.

From the Mirror (h/t Aisha):

Al Qaeda’s £168million cocaine smugglers: terror group flooding Britain with drugs

28 Apr 2013

Profits are being used to fund terror plots in the UK and western Europe

Al Qaeda has teamed up with other terror groups to smuggle cocaine to Britain, the Sunday People has ­discovered. One plot involved a staggering four tons of the illegal drug with a street value of £168million.

Al Qaeda, led by 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden until his death in May 2011, is using profits to fund terror plots in the UK and western Europe.

And they have paid for the cocaine with weapons looted in Libya during the mayhem following the death of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.

Spooks from MI6 and the UK’s criminal intelligence agency SOCA have joined forces to investigate al Qaeda’s links to drug cartels and terrorist groups in Africa and South America.

Two Colombians – one a member of left-wing terror movement FARC – were arrested after a probe by the US Drugs Enforcement Agency.

It is understood the South American group, now a major ­cocaine cartel, sold a large quantity of the drug to bin Laden’s North African branch, al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb.

They paid using cash and also weapons looted in Libya.

The drug was shipped to North Africa and moved across the Mediterranean into southern France where it is believed to have been distributed to other European ­countries, including the UK. A second operation carried out by secret intelligence groups led to the arrest of the former head of the navy in West Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, now classed as a “narco-state” because of its reliance on the cocaine trade.Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto and six others have now been flown to New York and charged with drugs trafficking. Four also face terrorism charges.

They were caught in a sting ­operation in which they believed they were talking to members of FARC. They agreed to supply ground-to-air missiles and a quantity of AK-47 assault rifles and grenade launchers in exchange for four tons of cocaine with a street value of £168 million.

Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb has long been involved with cocaine traffickers, receiving large payments to ensure drug runners could safely cross the Algerian Sahara with multi-million-pound consignments.

But spies say this is the first time evidence has emerged suggesting the organisation are themselves trafficking cocaine into Europe.

A highly placed crime ­intelligence source in London said: “It is a very worrying development and both MI6 and SOCA will be working ­together to find out as much as they can.

“When there is an overlap between straightforward crime and security matters, the two agencies work together. There will be a lot of interaction with security forces from several countries.

“France will be particularly involved given the Algerian connection and the fact that France seems to be the main entry point for the al Qaeda shipments. There will also be strong American interest”…

Welfare and drug money aided Tsarnaevs

The Tsarnaev brothers’ portfolio included proceeds from drug sales, and at least in the case of Tamerlan and Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, state welfare benefits.

CBS News reported yesterday that “Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers and suspects in last week’s Boston Marathon bombing attack, may have financed their plot through drug sales, investigators believe.”

Yesterday’s Boston Herald detailed the public assistance that Tamerlan received up until 2012:

Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.

State officials confirmed last night that Tsarnaev, slain in a raging gun battle with police last Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home.

In addition, both of Tsarnaev’s parents received benefits, and accused brother bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were recipients through their parents when they were younger, according to the state.

The news raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed his radicalization on taxpayer money…

Some news accounts portrayed the welfare benefits as a simple failure to make ends meet—an unfortunate result of a difficult economy.  But the possibility of intentional exploitation of public benefits by Tamerlan Tsarnaev should not be cast aside as a fringe theory.

The Associated Press recently reported that “Tsarnaev became an ardent reader of jihadist websites and extremist propaganda, two U.S. officials said. He read Inspire magazine, an English-language online publication produced by al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate.”

Observers have naturally focused on the infamous Inspire article, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” for giving instructions on constructing a pressure cooker bomb.

They should also look back at an article in the January 2011 edition of Inspire entitled “The Ruling on Dispossessing the Disbelievers’ Wealth in Dar Al-Harb,” in which al-Awlaki declared that Muslims living in the non-Muslim world should poach, steal, and embezzle just as if they were living off the land by hunting and gathering wood—an activity permitted under Hanafi rulings.  That behavior is even more blessed if it is done with the intent to fund jihad.

Money jihad news: recommended reading

• Cyber attacks are often treated as technology news. But now it’s more about bucks than bits… more>>

• So generous of Venezuela to have given a diplomatic passport Hezbollah agent Ghazi Nasr al Din . How many more operatives like him are immune from baggage searches at customs?  More>>

• You’re a kidnapped Filipino, and your government won’t pay for your ransom. Why your government is right… more>>

• The Palestinian Authority denies paying salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons.  I beg to disagree, says prisoner’s wife… more>>

• Are the FARC and Al Qaeda partnering in a cocaine-for-cash and weapons trade? And you thought cash-for-clunkers was bad… more>>

More details emerge on Paraguay’s Hezbollah drug lord

In January we learned about Wassim el Abd Fadel, a Lebanese financier of Hezbollah.  A surprising amount of detail has been disseminated through the press about this case.  Now even more has been released.  Thanks to El Grillo for sending this over this update:

Drug lord in Paraguay linked to Hezbollah

It was mid-December last year when Interpol caught, in the transit area of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, a 21-year-old Paraguayan woman who had swallowed over a kilogram of cocaine. Nelida Cardozo Taboada had disappeared from her hometown months before. She confessed to French police that she had been recruited as a “mule” by a network of drug smugglers. Her employer, a Paraguayan woman married to a Lebanese man, had convinced her to swallow the cocaine by promising her a job as a maid in Warsaw, Poland.

It took the police in Paraguay only a few days to reach the head of a Lebanese-led drug cartel in Ciudad del Este, a town located in the infamous tri-border area where the frontiers of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet. Wassim Abdel Fadel was arrested on December 21 together with his Paraguayan wife. But what police uncovered during the investigation led them further than they had expected.

According to information disclosed by Interpol and the Paraguayan police, Fadel, 30, was part of an international drug trafficking network controlled from Isla Margarita, Venezuela, a Caribbean holiday destination that is also an infamous hub for South American drug cartels. The leader of the cartel is Ghazi Atef Nassredine, also known as Abu Ali, a declared Hezbollah supporter who became a Venezuelan citizen 10 years ago and immediately thereafter became Venezuela’s diplomat to Beirut and Damascus. By arresting Fadel, Interpol and the Paraguayan police uncovered an international money-laundering and drug-smuggling network responsible for sending cocaine from South America to the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

Fadel was the leader of a network that would send laundered money, from drugs made in the tri-border area, to bank accounts in Istanbul and Damascus. According to a Paraguay Police Department press release sent to NOW, Fadel’s network regularly sent sums between $50,000 and $200,000 to these accounts. After investigating the owners, Paraguayan police came up with a list of Lebanese nationals known to be high-ranking Hezbollah members. Though the list was not disclosed to the media, the police said that the people on it were involved with Hezbollah’s financial operations. The same bank accounts also allegedly received money from different continents.

Although young, Fadel had gained control of an entire Hezbollah-backed real estate and drug market in Ciudad del Este after the network’s leaders – Lebanese-Americans Nemr Ali Zoayter, Amr Zoher, and Moussa Ali Hamdan – were arrested in Paraguay and extradited to the US. Zoayter and Zoher were caught in Ciudad del Este in 2008, while Hamdan was arrested in June 2010 in the same town.

According to statements released by the Paraguayan police, Fadel had been on the run for over three years. He was not only part of the drug cartel, but also the owner of a car-parts company, Fadel Automotores, located in Ciudad del Este. In 2008, several of his customers reported him to the police because he had defrauded them.

Fadel was born in Toulin, a village in the Lebanese district of Marjayoun. It was obvious to the villagers that he had made a fortune in Paraguay, as he had built a huge mansion in his hometown. However, he is not the only local who made his fortune in South America or West Africa; indeed, villages in the South and Beqaa Valley are studded with villas built by expatriates. But how the emigrants made their millions is often a mystery…

Recommended reading from the Economic Warfare Institute

Chart from UNODC’s World Drug Report 2012

Terror finance expert Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Ken Jensen have written a new piece on the Economic Warfare Institute Blog entitled “Trafficking Cocaine in the Name of Allah.”

Ehrenfeld & Jensen report that terrorists in Mali and Algeria use the drug trade to finance their activities, noting that, “While Islam forbids the use of drugs by Muslims, there are no such limitations in selling it to the infidels.”

The article also accounts for several other funding sources of the Mali rebels, which, as Money Jihad has indicated, include Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  It’s all well worth the read; check it out here.

Police: Lebanese expat transferred $50K-$200K per deposit to fund terrorist training

Hezbollah banks in Syria and Turkey received proceeds from Wassim el Abd Fadel’s CD and DVD pirating scheme along with cocaine trafficking profits according to Interpol and Paraguayan police.

How king of hawala funds Taliban’s terror

Haji Khairullah links heroin kingpins, jihadists, and hawala dealers in an “iron triangle” of terrorist financing according to U.S. and Afghan investigators quoted in a recent Reuters article.

Khairullah, who was blacklisted with sanctions from the U.S. Treasury Department last summer for his role in funding the Taliban, is the chief of a multi-million dollar hawala business spanning from Pakistan to Dubai.

Hawala is a traditional Muslim method of transferring cash that is difficult to detect or interdict, making it an ideal money service solution to Islamists.

The whole article is worth a read for the context it provides into the overlap between conventional business activities and terrorist financing in Afghanistan.  Here are just some of the most salient passages:

…The hunt for Khairullah’s presumed millions points to the sheer difficulty of choking Taliban funding channels.

Investigators who venture into the region’s forbidding ecosystem of illicit commerce find that lines between legitimate trade and criminality often blur, hand-written ledgers are barely decipherable, and deceptively nondescript offices move mountains of cash.

“Everything is done on a phone call and a handshake,” said one U.S. official. “The record system or the paper trail that allow you to connect the dots is not as clear as the Western system.”

In Kandahar’s seven-storey money market, where turbaned dealers haggle over bricks of well-worn notes, Khairullah’s colleagues leapt to the defense of a respected member of their age-old fraternity.

“When we went to his office, we only saw people changing money or drinking tea or eating sweets,” said Haji Qandi Agha, a regal-looking trader who is the market’s president. “There was no talk of the Taliban or heroin.”

Agha gestured to a man with a close-cropped beard and embroidered skull cap who had just approached his counter.

“For example, this man is sending money,” he said, after the customer produced a sheaf of grubby bills from his waistcoat. “What if the government or America captures him and says he’s Taliban? Is it my crime?”

The man, counting with deft thumbs, did not look up…

Current and former officials ascribe Khairullah’s wealth to… Afghanistan’s burgeoning heroin trade.

“He is one of the biggest fish in the region,” said General Khodaidad (who goes by one name), Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics minister from 2007 to 2010.

A source in Pakistan’s Anti-Narcotics Force also said Khairullah was suspected of involvement in trafficking. “He is rich and resourceful, therefore no one can touch him,” he said…

Investigators suspect Khairullah stands at the centre of an “iron triangle” locking hawala dealers, heroin kingpins and militants into an increasingly profitable symbiosis.

Taliban commanders would collect opium from poppy growers, then hand it over at his shops in farming communities in return for instant payments, a Western official said.

“He would take opium and give you cash,” he said.

Panamanian portal profits Hezbollah

Kenneth Rijock has another great piece on Panama—this one is about how Panamanian officials turn a blind eye to one of their banks being used by Hezbollah cocaine traffickers as a financial gateway to Lebanon.

Rijock pointedly asks “Is somebody asleep in Washington?”  Yes sir, and it’s not even 3 a.m.  The sun is up, but our leaders are snoring.

PANAMA IGNORES MASSIVE HEZBOLLAH MONEY LAUNDERING

Hezbollah Venezuela continues to actively launder its narcotics trafficking proceeds through a major Panamanian financial institution, which facilitates the movement of millions of dollars of its cocaine profits. Sadly, the story is well known to many of the country’s government and financial leaders. Though a small unit, numbering less than 100 cadre, Hezbollah Venezuela* regularly and continuously smuggles bulk cash into Panamanian airports, and into the bank. Remember the $25m that was seized upon arrival a while back ? Didn’t you wonder whose money it was ?

Once it has arrived in Panama, the drug cash is deposited in a bank whose ownership is linked through family ties to a senior government leader. Hezbollah has a small, but extremely effective, contingent in Panama, who facilitate the onward movement. Ultimately, most of the illicit profits are transferred to Beirut, and provide financial support for Hezbollah, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) group.

Formed only a few years ago, and seemingly undercapitalised, it has quickly outgrown its original location, and plans to move into a multi-million dollar skyscraper for its new headquarters. It would appear that providing financial support to terrorist organisations pays well; ask the owners.

Why isn’t the Government of Panama closing down this bank ? It would mean a regulatory agency would be shutting down a relative’s business, and obviously, this does not happen in the Republic of Panama.

A final question: why, in the face of overwhelming proof, has the bank not been sanctioned by the Latin American team  at OFAC ? Is somebody asleep in Washington ? The leader of Hezbollah Venezuela is OFAC-sanctioned.
__________________________________________________________________________
*Sometimes known as Hezbollah Latin America.

Hezbollah gets a lot of money from its international criminal network, but we shouldn’t forget when we hear information like this that the terrorist organization also receives a lot of money from khums, the traditional Shia Muslim tax—it just doesn’t get as much attention from law enforcement or coverage by the news media.

Afghan drug lord convicted

 

Catching up on some news from earlier this year.  Recall that Islam mandates a 10 percent ushr tax on harvests, and that the Taliban has collected revenues from poppy harvests accordingly.  From the Washington Post in March:

Afghan man convicted of drug, narco-terrorism charges in U.S. court

An Afghan citizen U.S. prosecutors alleged was once one of the world’s biggest heroin suppliers was convicted of drug distribution and narco-terrorism charges Tuesday in the District’s federal court.

Haji Bagcho, who is in his 60s and faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison at his sentencing in June, said nothing as jurors found him guilty of three of four charges related to heroin trafficking and support of the Taliban. He was acquitted of one heroin distribution charge.

It was Bagcho’s second trial on the charges; in November, jurors deadlocked on all counts.

Federal prosecutors Matthew Stiglitz and Marlon Cobar, who declined to comment after the verdict, alleged that Bagcho ran his organization from a palatial compound in Afghanistan’s Nangahar province, near the border with Pakistan.

During a 2007 raid of his chemist’s neighboring house, Afghan and U.S. authorities recovered a ledger that documented $250 million in sales of 137 tons of heroin the previous year. An agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration testified that the sales represented nearly 20 percent of the world’s 2006 heroin supply.

Afghan informants purchased drugs from Bagcho’s organization and recorded incriminating calls with the dealer. One testified that Bagcho provided the Taliban with cash, supplies and weapons.

Bagcho was arrested in 2009 in Pakistan, turned over to Afghan authorities and then extradited to the United States. His son, Sucha Gul, has also been indicted in the case…

Somali drug dealers fund jihad, 7 arrested

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the khat trade enriching Islamists in Somalia.  And it’s the third case in the last two months of Somali immigrants in England funneling money for terror back to the home country (see here and here).

This should not be read as a “drug crime” story; this is about a group of Muslim desperados engaged in activities to fund jihad.  If they could fund jihad by smuggling cigarettes, they’d do that.  If they could fund jihad by robbing banks, they’d do that.  If they could fund jihad by hawala transfers from the Somali diaspora back to Somalia, they would do that.  Drugs just so happen to be a profitable vessel—but the common link is jihad.

From the National Post on May 1:

Khat seized at Edmonton International Airport on March 7, 2012.

British police arrest seven for exporting khat to Canada, U.S. to finance terrorism

British counter-terrorism police arrested seven people Tuesday on charges they were part of a network that had been exporting khat to Canada and the U.S. to fundraise for terrorism.

Police raided four homes in London, Cardiff and Coventry at 6 a.m. as part of what Scotland Yard described as “a pre-planned, intelligence-led operation into suspected fundraising for terrorism overseas.”

Khat is illegal in Canada but remains popular among émigrés from East African nations such as Somalia, where chewing the leafy stimulant is a ritual for some, although conservative Muslims forbid it.

Much of the khat smuggled to Canada comes from Africa via London, where it is not considered a narcotic. The arrests suggest that at least some khat users in Canada may be unwittingly bankrolling terrorists.

British media reports linked the arrests of the six men and one woman to Al Shabab, the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group that has been fighting to impose its intolerant version of Islamic law on Somalis.

Cocaine profits made Beirut banks boom

You’ll hear a lot more in the coming months about how U.S. law enforcement exposed Hezbollah’s international narco-trafficking money laundering scheme.  But lost in the back slapping, attaboys, and high fives among prosecutors and politicians is just how much the scheme enriched the banking system of Lebanon and its Iranian partners.

New American Security senior fellow and money laundering expert David Asher discusses the details during an interesting presentation at the Washington Institute last month.  We’ll start the tape as Mr. Asher explains how used cars sold from the Americas  made their way to West Africa where the profits were mingled with illegal drug proceeds: