Charitable Front

Wednesday, May 29, 2002
Thanks to the evidence collected in part by Bosnian investigators, U.S. authorities arrested on 30 April a longtime terrorist suspect who they believe has close ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. The man arrested, Enaam Mahmoud Arnaout, is a Syrian-born U.S. citizen and the director of the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF) Islamic charity.

U.S. authorities filed a complaint against Arnaout and the BIF, accusing them of lying about their contacts with bin Laden. In a sworn statement filed in a civil lawsuit, Arnaout said the BIF did not provide support to "people or organizations known to engage in violence, terrorist activities, or military operations of any nature." But on 13 May, a judge in Chicago refused to toss out the perjury charges against Arnaout and the BIF, releasing photographs discovered on a computer disk in a raid on BIF offices in Sarajevo in March. One of the released photos shows bin Laden in rural surroundings, while another shows a person believed by prosecutors to be Arnaout at what appears to be the same location. Arnaout has been suspected of using the BIF ? which until very recently had a branch in Bosnia ? to funnel money to bin Laden and plan terrorist attacks on U.S. interests worldwide.

U.S. intelligence had been following Arnaout's activities for some time, and in December 2001 the BIF's U.S. assets were frozen. But the evidence needed to make an arrest could only come from the Bosniak-Croat federation, an area in which a moderate governing coalition was eager to help.

MORE STORIES Ukraine: Kuchmagate: Two Years On Slovakia: Meciar Beaten, NATO looms Republika Srpska: In Bed With Iraq? Slovenia: Still want to join E.U.? Russia: Chechen threat from Georgia Macedonia: Opposition Takes Elections SPECIAL Yugoslavia: Nations in Change Transitions Online News from Europe's 28 post-communist countries

On 19 March, the federation police — monitored by the U.N. Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina and FBI agents — raided the Sarajevo and Zenica offices of the Islamic charity Bosanska idealna futura, also called BIF, and the home of organization's director in Sarajevo, Munib Zahiragic. Bosanska idealna futura was only recently registered as a charity and inherited of all the assets of the Bosnian branch of the U.S.-based Benevolence International Foundation.

Police discovered a large cache of weapons and explosives, terrorist guides and manifestos, fake passports and other top-secret documents. An official statement said that "members of federal police found many top-secret documents ... which contain what we believe to be plans for global terrorist operations."

Among the documents confiscated were the Arnaout and bin Laden photos, believed to have been taken in the late 1980s in Afghanistan. In the BIF's Sarajevo office, police also confiscated administrative documents detailing cooperation agreements between bin Laden and his supporter networks. A number of personnel files were also found for people who are suspected members of al-Qaeda. Codes for secret radio messages were also discovered during the raid, police said, as well as codes for transferring weapons and determining targets.

An FBI statement said that after Bosnian police searched BIF offices in Sarajevo, Arnaout called the Bosnian BIF employees and asked them not to cooperate with local police. The FBI also claims that Arnaout gave instructions to Zahiragic to say that the two men have no connections other than business ones. But Zahiragic was arrested and charged with espionage.

Meanwhile, Arnaout's life story has triggered much interest in Bosnia. It emerged that the Syrian-born Arnaout arrived in Bosnia in early 1992, at the beginning of the war. He later married a Bosnian woman and was granted Bosnian citizenship. According to the Bosnian press, Arnaout met his Bosnian wife in 1996 in a refugee camp. She is only identified as Aida B and was a refugee from the town of Doboj, which was taken over by Bosnian Serbs in 1992. In an article last week, the Sarajevo weekly Slobodna Bosna called Arnaout "Bin Laden's Bosnian." In the United States, Arnaout married an American woman and eventually received U.S. citizenship as well.

According to Slobodna Bosna, the friendship between bin Laden and Arnaout began in the 1980s when they traveled together in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bin Laden trusted Arnaout enough that he asked him in 1989 to pick up one of bin Laden's wives at the airport in Islamabad. The paper based its report on an account given by a witness in the investigation against Arnaout.

By the end of 1992, Arnaout had founded and financed a couple of Islamic charities in Bosnia, the anonymous Interior Ministry source said. But the real purpose of those organizations, the source said, was to provide military training for members of the mainly Bosniak Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ABiH), with instructors being from Islamic countries.

In 1993 and 1994, Arnaout moved back and forth between Bosnia and Croatia and is known to have obtained false Croatian identity cards. At one point in 1994, he had a conflict with other Islamists in Zenica, who accused him of being an American spy. Arnaout was even beaten by a group of mujahedeen, the Interior Ministry source said. The beating did not convince Arnaout to leave Bosnia, however, and instead he founded the humanitarian BIF organization, whose official goal was to offer financial assistance to children without parents during the war.

Arnaout is alleged to have used his connections with the Bosniak nationalist administration to provide false Bosnian passports to his comrades, many of whom arrived in Bosnia as "BIF executives." The Interior Ministry now believes most of them were, in fact, military instructors, and some are likely to have been al-Qaeda members.

The history of the arrested director of Bosanska idealna futura, Zahiragic, is equally colorful, according to the source. Before working for the BIF, Zahiragic was a member of Bosniak intelligence, the Agency for Investigation and Documentation (AID). During the war, he worked at the Bosnian Embassy in the United Arab Emirates as a security officer. But police files showed that Zahiragic had had connections with terrorism before. He was arrested in 1987 and sentenced to five years in prison for his role in planning terrorist attacks on communications targets in the former Yugoslavia.

At the time, Zahiragic was the head of a mosque and police believed he worked alone. He is now said to have served his term in the same prison as former Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic and a group of other Islamic activists who were sentenced in a 1983 trial in Sarajevo.

When police raided the BIF's Sarajevo offices, the financial police came along as well, turning up evidence that the change in the organization's name, from Benevolence International Foundation to Bosanska idealna futura, was done in order to transfer assets to the new organization. The Interior Ministry source said that the financial investigation showed that over the past year, Zahiragic spent $165,000 from the BIF's account, with no documentation to show where that money went. In addition, the source said, from its 1993 founding, BIF Bosnia had transferred around $5 million dollars to unknown, undocumented sources. The Federation Financial Police, however, have no evidence that the money was used to support terrorist activities.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Bosnian authorities have arrested several suspects in the fight against terrorism, including six Arabs ? five of whom were Algerians — who were handed over to U.S. authorities in January. One of them, Boudella Hadz, was an employee of the BIF Zenica branch.

Over 700 Bosnian citizens of Arab origin are currently under investigation by the federation authorities. According to local media, the vigor of the federation authorities in the fight against terrorism is directly related to the shift in political power in the Bosniak part of the federation. Izetbegovic's Party of Democratic Action (SDA) is known to have helped many Arabs illegally obtain Bosnian citizenship. The SDA fell from power in 2000, and the nationalist party, which has recently become the center of negative attention in the light of the fight against terrorism, is not expected to fare well in the upcoming elections in October.

This article was edited and adapted from Transitions Online www.tol.cz