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U.S. Focusing on Dubai as Financial Center for Terrorists
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Western law enforcement and intelligence officials say that Dubai’s free-wheeling financial environment — a mix of modern wealth and ancient commerce — has allowed the country to become an important crossroads for financing terrorism. United States officials are focusing closely on Dubai, looking for ways to stop the flow of terrorists’ funds. But experts say there are daunting difficulties to penetrating the maze. "Contraband of all kinds moves through there — liquor, cigarettes, precious gems, you name it," said Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official with the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. "Dubai is going to emerge as one of the battlegrounds in terrorist financing. It’s a real, real problem and I don’t know anyone who has a handle on what’s going on there."
To include the government of Dubai...
Describing the United Arab Emirates as a clandestine rendezvous for planners of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the officials say half of the plotters’ money — about $250,000 — was wired from banks here to operatives of Al Qaeda in the United States. In addition, American intelligence agencies have tied Qaeda money in banks here to the American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Dubai’s conduits for terrorist money, experts say, include thriving Russian and Indian organized crime syndicates as well as the emirates’ many free trade zones, which allow the commingling of legal and illegal commerce.
We've been aware of this since at least 9-11-01...
But the most significant, elusive conduit is the informal international money-transfer network known as hawala. Largely relied on by Middle Eastern and Asian communities around the globe, hawalas allow users to deposit money in one country and have the sums honored by related dealers elsewhere — permitting expatriate workers here to send small monthly sums home. The Western officials assert that Dubai, along with Pakistan and India, forms the backbone of a system that abets terrorism. The Russian mafia is reported to be involved in Dubai’s nightclubs. Mobsters from both Russia and India are suspected by Western officials of trading in drugs, particularly heroin; analysts say they believe that such trafficking could provide a marriage of convenience for terrorists peddling drugs to raise cash.

For their part, officials of the emirates say that on the occasions when they do identify suspicious banking transactions, foreign counterparts rarely respond to their requests for detailed information to aid investigation. Banking officials here say that from August 2001 to May 2003, 429 reports of suspicious transactions were filed here and sent abroad — largely to Canada, Switzerland, Britain, the United States, Portugal, Italy and Luxembourg. The officials say the transactions have resulted in 46 active investigations in the emirates, but little aid from the countries they have notified.
Posted by: Paul Moloney 2003-10-05
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=19479