A religious charity organization in the USA and five of its former leaders, have been convicted of funding a foreign group designated as terrorists by the US Government.

Jurors in Texas reached a verdict of guilty after eight days of deliberations on charges of the Texas-based Holy Lanka Foundation for Relief and Development for funding the Palestinian militant group Hamas, designated a terrorist group in the US, agency reports said.

The group - once the largest US Muslim charity - was accused of giving more than $12m to support Hamas, in what was the largest terrorism financing trial since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

The former head of the charity, Ghassan Elashi, and the former chief executive, Shukri Abu-Baker, were convicted of 69 counts including money laundering and tax fraud.

Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh were convicted on three counts of conspiracy, and Mohammed El-Mezain was convicted on one count of conspiracy to support a terrorist organization.

The Holy Land group was convicted on 32 counts. Hamas was designated by the US as a terrorist group in 1995, making contributions to the group illegal. The prosecution argued that Hamas controlled the charities to which $12.4m was sent between 1995 and 2001.

The indictment against the group said it sponsored orphans and families in the West Bank and Gaza whose relatives had died or been imprisoned as a result of Hamas attacks on Israel.

The Texas-based charity, which said it ran a legitimate operation helping Muslim families, was shut down and had its assets frozen in 2001, as part of the clampdown that followed the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington.

TRO members charged

Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, the Colombo Additional Magistrate Kumari Abeyratne, yesterday (25) ordered eight suspects who were involved in fundraising for the LTTE, through the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (TRO) to appear in Court on February 03, 09, on charges of funding the terrorist activities of the LTTE.

The Magisterial order followed the CID informing Court that the Attorney General had advised suing the suspects following a complaint by the Central Bank’s Financial Intelligence Unit about their alleged funding of the LTTE and LTTE related activities. The Central Bank has frozen the funds of the TRO as on organization funding terrorism.

There have been many reports both from Sri Lanka and abroad of the activities of the TRO as a front organization of the LTTE, and raising funds to be diverted to its military operations under cover of assisting charities for the Tamil people and funding of so-called development work of the LTTE, which involves infra-structure facilities for its terrorist activities against the Sri Lankan state.