In US, Lashkar-e-Toiba chief's kin raised funds for jihad

In US, LeT chief's kin raised funds for jihad
12 Jan 2009, 0123 hrs IST, Indrani Bagchi, TNN
Print Email Discuss Share Save Comment Text:
NEW DELHI: For all the protestations that the Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a charitable organisation and Hafiz Mohammed Saeed is an injured innocent, it's
clear that the organisation and Saeed's family, in particular, have been in the crosshairs of US government for several years and a couple of Saeed's family members are already in US custody.

As the Lashkar-e-Taiba grew in stature, profile and links to violent terrorism in Pakistan, curiously, its amir Saeed's family kept making tracks to the US to live and work there over the past decade.

Over the years, LeT aka Jamaat-ud-Dawa has morphed from an ISI-sponsored terror outfit against India to become a global jihadist organisation with increasing ties to Al Qaeda.

The US has been on its trail for some time now, but could not do much because the JuD had sprouted roots in almost all areas of Pakistani life. The Mumbai attacks resurrected US security agencies' interest in this outfit.

And the reason for that, sources said, was that Saeed's family had been making determined tracks to the US -- to live there as imams and preach and raise funds for jihad.

The evidence for that came in bits and pieces. The first to land in the US was Muhammad Masood, Saeed's brother, who arrived in 1987 on a J-1 exchange visitor visa. He lived in the Boston area, working odd jobs until he started teaching at the Islamic Academy of New England at the Islamic Center of New England in Sharon, Massachusetts. Masood was arrested in November 2006 and charged with visa fraud and other unnamed crimes.

The second family member to arrive was Abdul Hannan, Saeed's brother-in-law (married to Masood's sister). Hannan arrived in the late-1990s, coming to the US through another member of their organisation, Muhammad Khalil, who is serving time currently in a US jail. By 1998, Hannan himself was in jail, also in Massachusetts.

He was out by 2002, and for the next couple of years floated around another US state, Rhode Island, also as an imam, before returning, as imam to Massachusetts. Hannan was again arrested in November 2006 with his brother-in-law Masood. So far, there were two members of Saeed's family in US jails.

The third member, another brother of Saeed named Hamid arrived in the US in 2001 for a programme at Harvard University. He returned to the US later in the year and became an imam at the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester. In October 2007, Hamid was deported to Pakistan, on visa irregularities. But one of the reasons, said sources, was that the US discovered that he used to run a safe house for LeT terrorists in Moon Chowk, Lahore, and that his imam activities in the US were all about teaching jihad to youngsters there.

By 2003, LeT offices were visible in California and Virginia. After the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, international organisations also discovered that the LeT had become an outsourcing centre, their terror training camps were also used to train other terrorists from other groups.

Basically, they became more anti-US, anti-west along with their anti-India fundamentals than ever before. The culmination of that was shown in the Mumbai attacks on November 26.

Bruce Riedel, a close foreign policy aide to US president-elect Barack Obama and author of the book `The Search for Al Qaeda', told TOI, "Mumbai demonstrated that Al Qaeda's ideology of global jihad has been adopted by LeT. The targets were Qaeda's targets: Israel America and India. I suspect that Qaeda may have had a hand in the planning given the longstanding and close ties between the two."

Gradually, the hunt for Al Qaeda and the hunt for terrorist groups targeting India are becoming the same. Which explains the intense interest of the international intelligence community in the investigations into the Mumbai attacks.

Daniel Markey, currently with the Council for Foreign Relations and earlier with the US State Department, told US media last year that US' greater concerns was that the LeT was becoming too allied to global jihad and not just an anti-India group.

Hussain Haqqani, currently, Pakistan ambassador in the US, wrote in his book `Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military', "They have managed to fly under the radar of the global network of law enforcement and still maintain their global links. But they have a grandiose ideological agenda and the capacity to wage violence, which makes them very dangerous."
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/In_US_LeT_chiefs_kin_raised_funds_for_jihad/articleshow/3964960.cms