July 01, 2004

"Feds Search Virginia Islamic Center"

Officials from the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (search ) were serving a search warrant Thursday on an Islamic center in Fairfax, Va., as part of a terrorism probe, four government officials told Fox News...

...The key part [of the search] is a probe into the possibility of terrorism financing.

Another part is the search for evidence that people associated with the organization may be helping � and perhaps harboring � illegal aliens...

The Defense Department used to do business with the school � an arm of the Saudi government � to recruit chaplains to run Pentagon programs for Muslim soldiers. The institute is part of Saudi Arabia's state-run university system and is funded and controlled by the kingdom's Ministry of Higher Education.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the institute's published curriculum calls for studying "the ruinous effect" of Christian beliefs. Lecturers have included a cleric who congressional investigators say was a spiritual adviser to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers. And the Muslim-American activist who helped arrange for the institute to train Muslim lay leaders, Abdur Rahman Alamoudi (search), was indicted in October for taking from Libya money that prosecutors suspect was intended to finance terrorism...

And, from January, there's "U.S. has quietly expelled dozens
of Saudi diplomats":

The Saudi diplomats, in a determination made by the FBI and Homeland Security Department, were said to have abused their diplomatic privileges in the United States. The sources said most of the diplomats were responsible for operations of the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America [IIASA] located in Fairfax, Va.

Posted to TheSaudis at July 1, 2004 01:26 PM

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