HLF Indictments Reveal Link Between Dallas City Hall Worker and Terror Group

Jul 28, 2004 10:46 am US/Central
CITY OF DALLAS ENGINEER'S BROTHER A TOP HAMAS LEADER, DRAWS SPECIAL FBI SURVEILLANCE AND SCRUTINY.

By Investigative Producer Todd Bensman
CBS-11 News

The federal government's roundup Tuesday of seven Middle Eastern men on charges of funding the terrorist group Hamas yielded an unexpected disclosure: a link between Dallas City Hall and Hamas' top leader in Israel's occupied territories.

North Texas resident Mufid Abdulquader is a city of Dallas engineer who was among the men charged Tuesday in a 42-count indictment for allegedly using the Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation to funnel millions of dollars to Hamas terrorist operations. But Abdulquader, a Palestinian and naturalized U.S. citizen, has a connection to Hamas shared by none of the others.

Abdulquader's Syrian-based half brother is a top leader of Hamas, ranking so high that he has been a target of high-profile Israeli assassinations that have killed other organization leaders in recent months. Abdulquader's half-brother - they share the same father - is Khaled Mishaal, Hamas' political bureau chief and U.S. designee as a global terrorist.

Until the government unsealed its indictment Tuesday, the family relationship between the city of Dallas engineer and Mishaal was known only to a few intelligence officials who had grown increasingly concerned about it as Hamas leaders began publicly threatening to target Americans.

Hamas has deployed dozens of suicide bombers who have killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in a quest to annihilate that country and replace it with an Islamic regime.

But recent threats by Hamas leadership to mount attacks on American soil provoked heightened fears within the FBI that the engineer could pass along sensitive information about the city's vital infrastructure systems to terrorists, two sources have told CBS-11 News.

The FBI therefore has kept Abdulquader under especially close scrutiny, using a variety of surveillance methods both on and off the job, the sources said.

"The relationship did concern us," one source told CBS-11. "I'd say it has been a concern all along."

Sources, however, said no evidence surfaced that Abdulquader had used his city job for nefarious purposes. It remained unclear Tuesday when Dallas city officials were made aware of Abdulquaber's family connection to Hamas or whether the city has cooperated in surveillance. City officials who would be aware of such cooperation could not immediately be reached for comment.

The government's indictment of the seven men accuses Abdulquader of working as a top fundraiser for the Holy Land Foundation and accuses him of praising Hamas through a violent dramatic skit depicting the killing of Jewish people.

Current and former FBI terrorism experts say the city engineer's half-brother directed suicide bombings against Israel.

"It's hard to think that it's permissible to carry out Jihad or blowing up a bus in Israel from the safety of the United States without ultimately creating the situation where people might do the same here," said Steven Emerson, who heads a private intelligence gathering agency in Washington, D.C.

The indictment accuses the Holy Land Foundation of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the families of suicide bombers. Abdulquader and the other six, including Dallas-area residents Shukri Abu Baker and Ghassan Elashi, also are accused of filing false tax returns and sending token donations to real charities as a means of hiding their more substantial activities of raising millions from U.S. muslims on false pretenses.

Dallas criminal defense attorney Tim Evans, speaking on behalf of the accused Tuesday, said they were the victims of a politically motivated investigation. He noted that the arrests took place during the Democratic national convention.

"There's been a tremendous amount of resources expended going after these families for all these years that in my opinion quite frankly could have been used to go after some real terrorist threat," Evans told reporters Tuesday after an arraignment of the three Dallas defendants.

Former FBI Special Agent Tino Perez, who worked on the current investigation before retiring last year, said the Holy Land Foundation sought to fool donors and silence critics by doling out some funds to legitimate causes.

"The money that was being collected here by this charitable organization was going to both the families of the needy, families of martyrs, and in some cases, the money was going toward the purchase of munitions, bombs and weapons to be used in their fight," Perez told CBS-11.

When President Bush shut down the Holy Land Foundation's Richardson offices two years ago, the organization's officers insisted there was no relationship with Hamas. At the time, one of the founders of the organization, the now-indicted Shukri Abu Baker, denied it gave money to anyone but orphans and needy refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"The Holy Land Foundation is a wolf in sheep's clothing," said Nancy Jardini of the Internal Revenue Service.
The foundation's original treasurer, Ghassan Elashi also was indicted Tuesday. He is already in federal custody, having been convicted recently of illegally shipping computers to Syria.

Supporters continued to maintain the foundation was only an ordinary charity. But new information released in the government's indictment suggests the foundation did not always act like an ordinary charity.

The indictment says the foundation taught employees how to shred documents and that it hired a security company to sweep its offices for listening devices.