Two leaders of a storefront mosque were arrested in a government sting operation after they allegedly agreed to launder money they were told would be used to pay for a shoulder-held missile to assassinate Pakistan’s ambassador in New York.
The Justice Department said Thursday that Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, 49, a pizzeria owner and co-founder of the Masjid As-Salam mosque in Albany, and Yassin Muhiddin Aref, 34, the mosque’s imam, were arrested Wednesday on suspicion of conspiracy to launder money and conceal material support for terrorism.
A senior Bush administration official said Aref has ties to Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist organization linked to many recent attacks in Iraq; the group is suspected to have links to Al Qaeda.
“He’s connected to Ansar al-Islam, but that’s all we can say at this point,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
On Thursday evening outside the mosque, not far from the state Capitol, spokesman Faisal Ahmad asked that judgment be withheld until the facts are known and said the Muslim community in Albany is against any forms of terrorism.
“Our imam has nothing to do with violence or terrorism,” he said. He described the other arrested mosque member as a “very kind person.”
More Top Picks Best Aquarium Sump Pumps For The Money
Deputy Atty. Gen. James Comey would not confirm that either man has ties to Ansar al-Islam or say why they became the object of an elaborate government operation launched a year ago.
“This case is a sting,” Comey said at a news conference. “A sting in which the government offered two men the opportunity to assist someone who they believed was a terrorist facilitator, supplying weapons to be used to commit terrorist acts.
“This case is important because we hope it will send a disrupting message to those out there who might be plotting to harm people in this country, around the world,” he added.
Comey said the case was not connected to the recent heightening of the terrorism alert status in New York and Washington, or to government information that Al Qaeda might be planning attacks on financial centers in those two cities. He also said neither Hossain nor Aref is accused of plotting “terrorist violence.”
In this case, Comey said, “the terrorist plot … is one that the government’s agent, the cooperating witness, represented to be under way. It was not real. It was represented.”
Although the government informant showed a missile to Hossain and Aref in the course of their many meetings over the past year, the weapon never changed hands.
In a similar sting operation last August, a British citizen was charged in federal court in Newark, N.J., with supporting terrorism and weapons smuggling. In that case, FBI agents posed as terrorists looking to buy a Russian-made missile to shoot down a U.S. airliner.
Hemant Lakhani allegedly sought $5 million for 50 missiles from the agents. He has pleaded not guilty and is due to stand trial Nov. 3.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy group in Washington, said the arrests of Hossain and Aref are likely to heighten the sense among American Muslims that their community remains under intense scrutiny by law-enforcement agencies almost three years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda operatives.
“It is something that we just have to live with,” Hooper said Thursday. “When it crosses the line into ethnic profiling, then we have to challenge it.”