This is the latest on a story we reported, here, in January.
From AP at ABC News:
A federal jury in San Diego on Friday convicted four Somali immigrants — including an imam from a local mosque — of conspiring to funnel money to a terrorist group in their native country.
After a three-week trial and three days of deliberations, the jury convicted the four men of conspiring to raise and send money to Somalia’s al-Shabaab. The men coordinated fundraising efforts and sent nearly $9,000 to al-Shabaab between 2007 and 2008, prosecutors said.
The U.S. Department of State designated al-Shabaab a terrorist group in 2008, saying it was responsible for targeted civilian assassinations and bombings in Somalia. Federal prosecutors have since cracked down on the group’s U.S. support with the arrests of some two dozen people.
Those convicted Friday include 40-year-old Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, who prosecutors said used his connections as a popular imam at a mosque in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood to raise money for the group. [Photo is from this 2010 story on the case.—ed]
Masjid Al-Ansar, a mosque located in City Heights, is where Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, has led prayer services during the past 10 years.
A money transfer business, Shidaal Express, was used in the transfer of funds to Al-shabaab. In 2009, I wrote about the feds busting a business by that same name for fraud also in San Diego, wonder if it’s the same one?
The other defendants were two San Diego taxi drivers, 36-year-old Basaaly Saeed Moalin and 56-year-old Issa Doreh, and 37-year-old Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud of Anaheim, whose financial transfer business Shidaal Express was used to route the money, prosecutors said.
The AP actually mentions how the Somalis got here—that’s something new and novel—through the Refugee Resettlement Program of the US State Department, but I can assure you the number of Somalis in the US now far exceeds the 87,000 AP says are here. Here are my stats for the last 30 years and these don’t take into account the numbers of Somalis who got into the US through other programs or illegally across the border. LOL! nor does it take into consideration the high birthrate in the Somali “community.”
Most of the 87,000 Somalis living in the United States have arrived through U.S.-sponsored refugee resettlement programs. The largest two U.S. Somali communities, and the sites of most of the arrests in the crackdown, are in San Diego and Minnesota.
What a coincidence: San Diego was also on the Somali underground railroad out of the US for those Somali youths we raised who returned to the Horn of Africa to learn the Jihad trade, here, in 2009.