Yemenis accused of aiding al Qaeda

Two Yemeni citizens, including an Islamic cleric with alleged links to Osama bin Laden, were charged in New York yesterday with supporting al Qaeda and Hamas, groups targeted by the United States in its war on terrorism.

The two men - accused of providing millions of dollars, weapons, communications equipment and recruits to al Qaeda and Hamas - were arrested in Germany on January 10. The United States has requested their immediate extradition, according to documents unsealed in a US District Court in Brooklyn.

The complaint said the charges were made against the two men largely on the basis of two FBI informants who took part in undercover operations in Yemen and Germany last year and this year posing as people who wanted to give money to Islamic extremists.

Yemen is the ancestral home of bin Laden, who is blamed by the United States for masterminding the September 11, 2001 hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington and other attacks on US interests in the past decade. Germany was an important base for the hijackers - three of the four pilots lived in the northern port of Hamburg in the 1990s.

The two men charged yesterday were named as Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad, 54, of Sanaa, Yemen, and Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed, 29, also of Yemen. If convicted under the charges of "providing material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization," Al-Moayad faces a possible prison sentence of up to 60 years, and Zayed faces up to 30 years, officials said.

The unsealing of the charges was first announced in Washington yesterday during testimony by US Attorney General John Ashcroft to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said the complaint alleges that some of the money was raised from the al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn.

"Al-Moayad also claims to be Osama bin Laden's spiritual adviser," Ashcroft said. He said Al-Moayad was alleged to have given bin Laden $20 million.

According to the court papers, in December 2001, one informant reported to the FBI that Al-Moayad "was involved in supplying money, arms and recruits to mujahideen fighters, i.e. men fighting for extremist Muslim groups such as al Qaeda in Afghanistan and separatists in Chechnya and Kashmir."

The complaint said Al-Moayad was an official of the Islah political party in Yemen and the Imam, or spiritual leader of al-Ihsan mosque in Sanaa. The informant knew Al-Moayad for more than six years and prayed at the mosque, the complaint said.

Zayed was identified in the complaint as a secretary to Al-Moayad who took part in several meetings Jan. 7 to Jan. 9 in Frankfurt, Germany, between the cleric and the two informants. They discussed who to contact in the United States to transfer the money.

The complaint under the name of a FBI agent alleged that during one conversation that was videotaped and recorded on audiotape, Al-Moayad identified al Qaeda and Hamas as the groups that would receive the money.

It said that when one informant asked Zayed if he could be trusted to give money to the groups, "the defendant swore to Allah that he would" and suggested to the informant "that possibly arrangements could be made with members of Hamas to allow (the informant) to send money directly to Hamas."

The militant Islamic group Hamas is behind a wave of attacks in Israel during a 29-month-old Palestinian uprising.