[Financial Times] An Islamist militant accused of funding the 2009 Jakarta suicide bombings has been selling advertising space on his website to international corporations including Citigroup, IBM and Microsoft using a service provided by Google.Muhammad Jibril Abdul Rahman, known as the Prince of Jihad,
| Presumably because of his raspberry beret. |
But his jihadi propaganda website, Arrahmah.com, has been making thousands of dollars by hosting advertisements from global companies. The ads were delivered to the website, which includes images of beheadings and hangings, by intermediaries including Google's AdSense, the biggest online ad network, which take a portion of the revenues.
There is no suggestion that the advertisers or Google knowingly funded a designated terrorist, a criminal offence in the US that carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison or a $1m fine.
After being contacted by the Financial Times, Google cancelled Arrahmah.com's account and advertisers asked to be removed from the site. However, ads for major western brands continue to appear on the site through other intermediaries.
Arrahmah.com illustrates the increasing sophistication of Islamist propaganda networks and the expanding range of funding sources they have been able to tap into. Large technology groups including Google, Twitter and Facebook have come in for criticism by security services in recent years for not doing enough to keep extremists off their platforms.
The website, which promotes its views in sections such as "Jihad Zone", attracts about 600,000 visits a month. Arrahmah.com discloses prominently that Abdul Rahman is its chief executive.
In 2010, Rahman was sentenced to five years in an Indonesian prison for concealing information related to the terrorist attacks at two prominent hotels in Jakarta, which killed seven people and wounded around 50.