Qaeda drug finace source busted

NY Post:

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has shut down a massive terror-finance pipeline in which a whopping $3 billion in profits from drug deals and other crimes flowed through a major New York bank to Middle East fanatics, The Post has learned.

Morgenthau told The Post his office is pursuing a settlement involving possible penalties against one of the largest and most prominent banks in New York - which he declined to identify - for maintaining an account where funds that originated in South America's notorious "tri-border region" were rerouted to suspect accounts in the Middle East.

Evidence developed in the course of a three-year probe, which has already resulted in charges against other New York-based financial institutions, revealed that about $3 billion that flowed through the account over a two-year period was going to terror groups Hamas, al Qaeda and Hezbollah, Morgenthau said.

"I can't go out and arrest Osama bin Laden. But I can try to cut off his money," Morgenthau said of his massive probe.

...

He said most of the $3 billion in suspicious funds were generated, through criminal enterprises, in the lawless tri-border region of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

Over a two-year period, the $3 billion was sent to the New York bank account by a shadowy money-transmittal company in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The money then flowed into bank accounts in the Middle East locations including Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Beirut, Lebanon, and Ramallah in the Palestinian territories.

The probe of the New York bank grew out of the Manhattan DA's previous 2004 prosecution of the Beacon Hill Services Corp., an Upper East Side money transmitter that moved more than $9 billion in suspect funds through accounts in Chase Manhattan Bank and other institutions.