Mo. case shows it's hard stopping al-Qaida money
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Within two years of taking his oath of U.S. citizenship, a Moroccan-born Kansas City used auto parts dealer funneled more than $20,000 in fraudulent bank loans to al-Qaida using a bank account in the United Arab Emirates.
Investigators won't say who got the money or if it was ever used to help finance a terror attack, but the case highlights the difficulty in stemming the flow of money — especially small amounts — to terrorists, security experts say. Though the $23,500 Khalid Ouazzani admitted giving to al-Qaida might not seem like much, it's a huge amount when added to similarly moderate donations made to terrorists that fly under the intelligence radar, they say.
"It's probably widespread, more so than we'd like to think," said Dennis Lormel, a retired FBI agent who headed the government's terrorist financing investigative unit after 9/11. "You can get into semantics about amounts, but this guy is not the only guy out there doing this type of thing. You multiply $23,000 times 10, it's still not a tremendous amount of money. Multiply it again and you start seeing more significant funds."
