Terrorist Ruse Hurt Giving by Muslims

The visitor was seeking humanitarian assistance for war victims in Afghanistan. So Sacramento Muslims did what they routinely do when presented with a good cause: They gave money.

They were lied to. The man touring mosques in Sacramento and elsewhere in the United States in the early 1990s, claiming to raise money for widows and orphans, was actually financing terrorism.

The man wasn't just any fund-raiser, either. He was Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, then the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now the right-hand man of accused terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Traveling under an alias, al Zawahiri is believed to have raised roughly $500,000 in the United States for such activities as the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan, according to terrorism expert Peter Probst. Al Zawahiri raised $3,000 to $4,000 at Sacramento's Masjid Annur mosque, said Metwalli Amer, a prominent Sacramento Muslim who unwittingly helped host al Zawahiri's trip to the city.

Al Zawahiri's U.S. fund-raising success illustrates the dilemma facing American Muslims--and the problems confronting the Bush administration as it tries to crack down on bin Laden's financial network.

Giving to charity is one of the foundations of Islam, and much of bin Laden's money comes from Islamic charities and other nonprofit groups in the United States and abroad, experts say. Although some donors knowingly support terrorists, most are in the dark, experts say. Some charities cover their ties to terrorists by funding schools, ambulance corps and the like, complicating shutdown efforts and generating confusion among donors.

"I'm trusting, and sometimes it shakes my trust," said Amer, a college professor who runs an organization called the Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims. "You bring people here and you don't know if they have a hidden agenda."

Farouk Fakira, president of Masjid Annur--the Sacramento mosque that hosted al Zawahiri in the early 1990s -- said the mosque demands to see paperwork confirming a charity's federal nonprofit status before allowing any fund-raisers. Fakira said these safeguards preceded the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Most of the people are very wary," he said. "There are a lot of scam organizations."

Fakira, who came to Sacramento in 1995, said he wasn't familiar with reports of al Zawahiri's visit to the mosque.

Continued on page 2: »