Federal Agents Raid Mosque in Albany
Thursday, August 05, 2004
ALBANY, N.Y. — Federal agents and Albany police raided a Muslim mosque overnight Wednesday and arrested two men for helping someone they thought was a terrorist, a law enforcement official confirmed to FOX News on Thursday.
The men have ties to a group called Ansar al-Islam (search), which has been linked to Usama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terror network, according to law enforcement officials. The State Department has declared the group a foreign terrorist organization.
A block of downtown Albany (search) was sealed off with armed officers for several hours after the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agents executed search warrants at the Masjid As-Salam mosque and two Albany-area residences. Officials said the arrests have nothing to do with the U.S. government raising the terror alert level for New York, Washington, D.C. and Northern New Jersey on Sunday.
Yassin Muhhiddin Aref, 34, the Imam of the mosque, and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, the 49-year-old founder of the mosque and local pizzeria owner, were arrested early Thursday morning at their homes. They are accused of reaching out to someone they thought was a terrorist trying to get a shoulder-fired missile (search) to down planes in the United States.
FOX News learned from a law enforcement official, however, that that person was not a terrorist, and actually it was all a sting operation; no missile ever was exchanged. The two men are accused of agreeing to help launder money to pay for the missile.
U.S. officials have said Ansar's members are thought to be linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (search), the Jordanian militant whose network is considered one of the most dangerous groups fighting coalition forces in Iraq and who is thought to be responsible for kidnappings and beheadings of contract workers there.
The men had been under FBI surveillance for some time, FOX News has learned. They were picked up Thursday morning because of law enforcement's concern that the two were flight risks; one of the men reportedly tried to buy a plane ticket recently.
The investigation has been going on for a year and is not related to the Bush administration's decision earlier this week to raise the terror alert level for certain financial sector buildings in New York and Washington, officials said. Government officials are conducting several searches in the Albany area related to Thursday's arrests.
A press conference will be held at 1:30 p.m. EDT Thursday at the Department of Justice in Washington.
The criminal complaint against the mosque leaders was filed Thursday in federal court in Albany, New York. They are officially accused of attempting to launder money and conspiring to launder money from illegal activity to fund the purchase and use of a weapon of mass destruction.
The exact charges include: conducting and attempting to conduct financial transactions with the intent to conceal and disguise the nature, location, source, ownership and control of property believed and represented to be the proceeds of specified unlawful activity; conspiring to do the same; attempting and conspiring to conceal and disguise the nature, location, source and ownership of material support and resources, knowing and intending that they are to be used in preparation for, and in carrying out, unlawful use of weapons of mass destruction.
The criminal complaint says that during the summer of 2003, when the probe began, the FBI monitored and recorded most of the conversations between the FBI's informant and Aref and Hossain.
The conversations were mostly in Urdu between Hossain and the informant; the conversations between the informant and Aref were mostly in English.
According to the complaint, the informant had been previously arrested by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Albany and had pled guilty to a felony related to the fraudulent acquisition of documents. The informant, not a U.S. citizen, is cooperating in the hopes of getting a reduced sentence.
The informant also has provided information previously leading to the arrest of 12 individuals on federal mail fraud and heroin-related offenses. All but one of these individuals have pled guilty. The twelfth is a fugitive.
Proud to Be an American?
Some mosque members held morning prayers Thursday on a nearby sidewalk since they weren't allowed to enter the building, which is located at 276 Central Ave. near the corner of N. Lake Ave., just a few blocks from Washington Park. The mosque's name means "mosque of peace."
On Tuesday, William Chase, special agent in charge of the FBI's Albany office, said there had been no terrorism-related arrests in the area and relatively few nationally since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"But I think as time goes on you'll start to see an increased number of prosecutions as law enforcement increases its level of activity and starts looking at some of the ancillary things like financing and those type of things, the things that feed into the system that supports the terrorism," Chase said.
Hossain, who emigrated from Bangladesh in 1985, worked as a dishwasher in diners before saving up enough money to open his own pizzeria in downtown Albany in 1994.
In a recent interview with the Albany Times Union, the married father of five said it was his dream to come to America. He also said he's "proud to be an American."
Concerns about terrorists using shoulder-fired missiles to take down commercial airliners were heightened in November 2002 when two SA-7 missiles narrowly missed an Israeli passenger jet as it took off from Mombasa, Kenya. It's believed Al Qaeda probably was behind the attack, which coincided with a bomb blast at a nearby Israeli-owned hotel.
Last November, a shoulder-fired missile struck a DHL cargo plane at Baghdad International Airport, forcing it to make an emergency landing at the airport with its wing aflame.
Estimates put the number of such missiles around the world at 750,000 and they're easy to obtain on the black market.
The Homeland Security Department (search) has contracted with three companies to develop plans for anti-missile systems that could be used to defend U.S. commercial planes against shoulder-fired rockets.
It's estimated that it would cost about $1 million per plane to install anti-missile systems. There are about 6,800 planes in the U.S. commercial fleet.
The arrests were the second such get for law enforcement when it comes to shoulder-fired missiles.
Hemant S. Lakhani, 68, was arrested last August after he tried to buy an anti-aircraft missile in Newark from an undercover agent working with the FBI. Lakhani thought he was dealing with a man representing a Somali terrorist group. Lakhani, an Indian-born British citizen, also offered to broker a deal for several tons of C-4 explosive, according to the federal indictment.
Prosecutors said more than 150 covertly recorded conversations prove that Lakhani was trying to deal arms to terrorists.
Also arrested in August were Yehuda Abraham, 76, a New York diamond dealer, and an Indian citizen, Moinuddeen Ahmed Hameed, 38.
FOX News' Liza Porteus, Anna Stolley and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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