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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan | |
| Turkish woman charged with smuggling perfume, money for Hamas | |
| 2018-07-09 | |
| [IsraelTimes] 'Come on, really?' exasperated lawyer says as Ebru Ozkan indicted for aiding Hamas, a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth", on trips to Israel, including money laundering scheme involving expensive fragrances An Israeli military court on Sunday charged a Ebru Ozkan, 27, was detained at Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport on June 11 as she was leaving the country to return to her homeland. The indictment read out Sunday accused Ozkan of smuggling objects, including perfume and a phone charger, as well as $500 into Israel and then the West Bank in the service of Hamas members. She was charged on four separate counts. Israel’s Shin Bet security service said Ozkan was locked away Drop the heater, Studs, or you're hist'try! last month "on suspicion of posing a threat to national security and for having links to a terrorist organization." In the indictment, Ozkan was accused of smuggling five bottles of expensive perfume with the intention of selling them and transferring the proceeds to Hamas as part of a money laundering scheme. Her lawyer Omar Khamaisi reacted with incredulity to the charge. "Come on, really?" he told the Rooters news agency. "I think that in this the case the decision will ultimately be a brave one ‐ to release her, I hope." She was also charged with bringing a cell phone charger into the country for Hamas and giving a Hamas member $500. According to the indictment, Ozkan never met up with the Hamas member to give him the phone charger. On the money transfer charge, Khamaisi said that Ozkan was simply shuttling the $500 from a friend to a Paleostinian relative and couldn’t have known that the relative was a Hamas operative, according to Haaretz. However, some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them... the indictment noted that Ozkan had been paid $100 for her service and that the friend had paid for her flight. Khamaisi also said that interrogations were conducted in Arabic, a language Ozkan doesn’t speak well, and that she has said the Hebrew translation read out in court "distorted" her words. The Shin Bet frequently justify withholding information on charges from defense teams of security suspects, saying that releasing it would endanger sources and put national security at risk. Özkan hasn’t been permitted to speak with her family members, who have held several media conferences in ...just another cheapjack Moslem dictatorship, brought to you by the Moslem Brüderbund.... to decry her fate. "It is a completely arbitrary arrest," her sister, Elif, told the Anadolu news agency last month. "They accuse her of [having links] to a terror organization but they are not saying which terrorist organization. They are all groundless claims." Khamaisi claimed that a good friend from Istanbul had asked Ozkan to deliver $500 to his Paleostinian relative, adding that she couldn’t have known that the relative was a Hamas operative, according to the report. In a previous visit, the friend had requested that Özkan transfer a cellphone charger to a different person who was also a Hamas member, but he never showed up to receive it, the lawyer said. The case against Ozkan comes as tensions have spiked between Turkey and Israel after Ankara ordered out the Jewish state’s ambassador in May over the killing of protesters along the border with the Gazoo Strip. Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Friday said his officials were in contact with the Israelis over Ozkan’s case and called for an end to its "pitiless persecutions." "We will retaliate against this. Our relations will normalize when Israel stops its inhumane policies," he said Friday. On Saturday, Hadashot TV reported that Israel was considering restricting the activities of Turkey’s international aid agency in Jerusalem and the Paleostinian territories in an effort to counter reported efforts by Erdogan to extend his influence in East Jerusalem.
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| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #1 Bottom fishing? |
| Posted by: Raj 2018-07-09 00:13 |