SAN FRANCISCO: An FBI informer in the Ohio terror case involving the Muslim charity, KindHearts, and three brothers has disappeared. Griffin, who was known to his fellow workers as Bilal and was nicknamed ‘the Trainer’ in a federal indictment, worked for three years at KindHearts that was shut down by the US administration last month.
Prosecutors said the informer, whose full name has not been released at the request of the FBI, made the case against the three men arrested last week — Marwan El-Hindi, Mohammad Amawi and Wassim Mazloum.
The defendants are accused of secretly plotting to help and also to join the insurgency against the US-led coalition forces in Iraq.
Prosecutors have said that investigations into the case of the three brothers and KindHearts were separate. But investigators raided KindHearts and the men’s homes on the same day last month and seized items related to the charity in the homes and at a travel agency where one of the suspects worked.
Hartman and Charles Sallah, who represent Mazloum, question whether Bilal had trapped their clients. “I want to know how big a role he played in creating the conspiracy. Was he really the main criminal?” Sallah said.
Jihad Smaili, KindHearts’ attorney and a board member, said he believed investigators had planted Bilal inside KindHearts in an effort to link the charity with alleged terrorists. “They had a guy working inside,” Smaili said. “You’d expect people to be in jail. You’d expect the leaders to be locked up.”
No one from KindHearts has been charged with committing a crime, although the Treasury Department seized the charity’s office and froze its bank accounts on the same day the three terrorism suspects were arrested.
Officials contend that KindHearts financially supports Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist group.
Prosecutors have said investigations into KindHearts and the three men are separate but the raids needed to be done in concert to avoid compromising either.
Smaili insists that the KindHearts raid was a reaction to Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections last month and recent criticism that federal authorities had not done enough to crack down on Muslim American charities.
In another case, meanwhile, federal prosecutors told a court in Chicago that they still did not know if the accused, Mohammed Salah, was a target of the Bush administration’s secret spying programme — but insisted they didn’t have to tell him if the Bridgeview mosque that was attended by Salah had been infiltrated by the FBI.
Salah, the only US citizen to be declared an international terrorist, has pleaded innocent to the charges alleging that he served as an operative for Hamas.
A crucial hearing began last week to determine if a series of alleged confessions Salah gave to Israeli authorities after his 1993 arrest there can be used against him here. Salah says that the statements were tortured out of him.
Yet in another FBI anti-terrorism sting operation, known as Albany mosque case, the issue of secrecy remains unresolved and further complicated by recent allegations that warrantless wiretaps were used to gather evidence.
US District Judge Thomas McAvoy scheduled a hearing on March 24 in Binghamton on pre-trial motions, including bail reconsideration for Imam Yassin Aref and the Justice Department’s reply on the use of wiretaps.
