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| Europe |
| Ansar al-Islam member charged with funding insurgency |
| 2006-02-07 |
| German prosecutors today said they had charged an Iraqi man in the latest of a series of probes into fundraising or recruiting for the insurgency against the Baghdad government and its US-led backers. The 34-year-old, named as Ferhad Kanabi A., is accused of gathering money for Ansar al-Islam, which Germany classes as a foreign terrorist organisation. In a statement, the federal prosecutor's office said he had worked closely with two other men who are separately charged and facing trial in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate Iraq's then prime minister Iyad Allawi in Berlin in 2004. An Iraqi Kurd accused of recruiting fighters and raising cash for the insurgency was jailed for seven years last month in another German case involving Ansar al-Islam, which the United States has linked to al Qaeda and its leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Volunteers from several European countries including France, Belgium and Spain are known to have travelled to fight in Iraq. Some have died there, including a 38-year-old Belgian woman who blew herself up in a suicide attack last November. European security officials are concerned others will return, battle-hardened, and pose a militant threat on European soil. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |