June 29, 2008	Sunday	Jamadi-us-Sani 24, 1429

NEW YORK, June 28: A 33-year-old Pakistani man, who was arrested in Glen Burnie with $180,000 in cash that he intended to channel into a secret finance network with links to terrorism, was sentenced to three and half years in prison, the Maryland US attorney’s office announced on Friday.

Raja Ansar Mohammad, AKA Raja Mehmood, was based in New York and living in the United States illegally as part of an international money laundering scheme known as “hawala,” an informal system of hand-to-hand money transfers that crisscrosses the globe and is virtually untraceable, US attorney Rod. J. Rosenstein’s office said in a press statement.

Mohammad was arrested last September as part of a sting that netted indictments of 39 people, including several Pakistani operators of convenience stores on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Many were involved in hawala, which has been linked to illegal activities around the world and US officials suspect of funding terrorist groups.

Although the “Hawala” system is not in itself illegal, US law demands that large money transfers to overseas locations be reported to federal officials and that such businesses have commercial licenses. This special scrutiny is undertaken in case of Pakistani businesses.

“The hawala system can be used by criminals to launder money without using financial institutions, by giving the money to a person in the United States and then picking it up in a foreign county,” Rosenstein said in statement.

The yearlong investigation that culminated in Mohammad’s arrest and guilty plea was conducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigations, and police departments in Spain, Australia the Netherlands and Belgium.