WASHINGTON, Jan 17: A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted a former US lawmaker for his links to a charity that sent funds to an Afghanistan-based supporter of Al Qaeda through banks in Pakistan.
Former Republican representative Mark Deli Siljander was named in a 42-count indictment against the Missouri-based Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), charged with “engaging in prohibited financial transactions for the benefit of US-designated terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” the US Department of Justice said in a statement.
Siljander, 57, faces money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges in the case.
Hekmatyar is an Afghan leader who received US aid in the 1980s to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He briefly served as Afghan prime minister in the 1990s and initially opposed the Taliban regime, but then switched sides after the October 2001 US-led invasion.
According to the indictment, in 2003 and 2004 IARA sent some 130,000 dollars to bank accounts in Peshawar, Pakistan “purportedly for an orphanage housed in buildings owned and controlled by Hekmatyar” – who is believed to be hiding in eastern Afghanistan or Pakistan while leading his Hizb-i-Islami faction.
Siljander, who represented a congressional district in the midwestern state of Michigan from 1981 to 1987, owns and heads a public relations company.
The indictment says IARA hired Siljander in March 2004 to lobby Congress to remove the group from a US Senate Finance Committee list of non-profit organisations suspected of supporting international terrorism.—AFP
