Mubarak Hamed, a naturalized citizen from Sudan, admited last Friday he sent over $1 million to Iraq in violated of U.S. sanctions. He and others involved spent years denying allegations, though. He is the third person to have plead guilty in the case. Two more remain to be tried, including former U.S. congressman Mark Deli Siljander.
Hamed served as executive director of the now-defunct Islamic American Relief Agency-USA from 1991 until October 2004, when federal agents raided the charity’s Columbia offices and carted off truckloads of documents and computers.The same day, the U.S. Treasury Department froze the charity’s assets and said it was part of a global network of similarly named charities that supported terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida, the Taliban and Hamas.
In pleading guilty, Hamed also admitted to a long string of facts in his plea agreement, many of which he and others had spent years denying. After contending that his charity was an entirely independent organization, he acknowledged Friday that it was part of an international organization headquartered in Khartoum, Sudan, that also used the initials IARA.
The African charity, according to federal officials, had frequent contact with the worst players in international terrorism.
...Siljander is accused of taking $75,000 from IARA to help the charity have its name removed from a U.S. Senate Finance Committee list of organizations that allegedly supported terrorism. Prosecutors contend the money had been stolen from a U.S. Agency for International Development grant that IARA was supposed to have used for relief projects in the African nation of Mali.
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