Islamic charity indicted for money laundering

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - A federal grand jury has indicted a now-defunct Islamic charity and five men for illegally transferring funds to Iraq and stealing U.S. government grant money, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

A 33-count indictment unsealed on Wednesday charges the Islamic American Relief Agency, or IARA, headquartered in Columbia, Mo., and charity officers and associates with a range of crimes related to money transfers to Iraq.

The Islamic charitable organization, formerly known as the Islamic African Relief Agency-USA, was formed in 1985 and closed in October 2004 after the U.S. Treasury Department said it was a global terrorist organization.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Missouri, the group is accused of transferring more than $1.4 million to Iraq from March 1991 to May 2003 in violation of laws imposing sanctions on Iraq.

Those sanctions were lifted in May 2003 following the U.S. invasion and the ouster of the Ba'ath party and the end of the regime of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Prosecutors said the charity also misused grant money obtained through agreements with the U.S. Agency for International Development that was designated for relief projects in Mali, Africa.

Five officials of the charity are charged with several counts of money laundering as well as falsely representing the charity's activities and filing misleading tax forms.

Prosecutors also said Wednesday that "a person acting on behalf of IARA" falsely claimed that Ziyad Khaleel, a publicly identified associate and procurement agent of Osama bin Laden, had never worked for IARA when in fact, the indictment says, Khaleel had been an employee of IARA.

The officials charged are Mubarak Hamed, 50, the former executive director of the charity, Abdel Azim El-Siddiq, 50, an IARA vice president, Ali Mohamed Bagegni, 53, a charity board member, Ahmad Mustafa, 54, an IARA fund raiser, and Khalid Al-Sudanee, 55, a Middle East coordinator.

Neither Al-Sudanee nor El-Siddiq have yet been arrested, though the other three defendants have been, according to Don Ledford, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office.