Toni Locy and Kevin Johnson, USA Today
WASHINGTON -- The FBI arrested 20 people Wednesday in two terrorism investigations, including a high-profile Saudi Arabian graduate student at the University of Idaho.
The arrests, part of an FBI effort to disrupt networks that finance terrorism, stem from investigations of two groups of defendants.
A grand jury in Syracuse, N.Y., accused four men and two charities -- Help the Needy and Help the Needy Endowment Inc. -- with funneling $2.7 million to Iraq. Three of the men are in custody.
Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, 34, was arrested at his apartment in Moscow, Idaho, on charges filed in Boise that he routed thousands of dollars from Saudi sources to a Detroit Islamic group associated with Help the Needy.
Grand juries in Wisconsin and Mississippi charged 16 people with sending money to the Middle East from a coupon redemption scam involving 300 stores in 15 states. The FBI is investigating how the money was used. All 16 suspects were arrested.
Al-Hussayen, a past president of the Muslim students’ association at the University of Idaho, is seeking his doctorate in computer science with an emphasis on guarding computer systems from cyberattack, prosecutors said. He allegedly set up and operated a half-dozen Web sites for the Islamic Assembly of North America in Detroit.
The Web sites contained messages from Islamic militants that appeared to promote violent attacks against U.S. interests. One of the messages appeared just before the Sept. 11 attacks.
University of Idaho spokeswoman Nancy Hilliard says Al-Hussayen, one of 13 Saudi students at the school, worked as a teacher’s assistant in the computer science department, where he has been a doctoral candidate since 1999.
“As far as we knew,” Hilliard says, “he was a scholar and student.”
Dave Thompson, dean of the university’s College of Engineering, says Al-Hussayen’s arrest is “one of those weird circumstances when you are caught completely off guard. We are proud of our international students here, but we also support our government’s homeland security efforts.”
According to the Idaho indictment, Al-Hussayen served as the Idaho agent for the Detroit group. The grand jury in Syracuse accused four other men -- including an oncologist in Fayetteville, N.Y., and another man who worked as an imam at the nearby Auburn Correctional Facility -- of conspiring to launder money bound for Iraq through a Jordanian bank.
Al-Hussayen also is charged with lying on his student visa application by failing to disclose his association with the Detroit group. The five other men are charged with violating presidential orders barring dealings with Iraq.
The FBI says the group of 16 defendants caused more than $4 million in losses for companies that offered coupons. The stores accused in the scam allegedly turned in huge amounts of coupons for redemption, even though the products were never purchased.