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| Southeast Asia |
| Where'd the money come from? |
| 2002-10-16 |
| The information on the Saudi funding was gathered in U.S. interrogations of Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti linked to al Qaeda who was arrested in Indonesia in June and later handed over to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan, said Rohan Gunaratna, author of the book "Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror." The money was sent to Jemaah Islamiah earlier this year, said Gunaratna, who has seen the U.S. interrogation papers. The amount sent by the Saudi donor was $74,000, the Financial Times said. That'll buy a fair amount of boom materials... Gunaratna said the explosives were bought from Indonesian army officers who sold the material illegally. The C4 explosives are the same material used in the al Qaeda-linked bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen two years to the day before the Bali attack. Gunaratna said the explosives bought by Jemaah Islamiah were shipped to the Indonesian island of Ambon, the site of numerous bloody attacks between Christians and Muslims in recent years, and divided among different Islamist groups. Killing Christians is a favorite passtime in Maluku. These guys seem to have assumed that killing Balinese Hindus and a bunch of furriner infidels caught with beer in their hands would be in the same category. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |