A Virginia man believed to have provided communications equipment to Osama bin Laden has been indicted on mortgage loan fraud.
Tarik Hamdi, 43, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Iraq who now lives in Herndon, Va., has been charged by a federal grand jury with receiving mortgage loans by inflating his income on loan applications, according to records filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va.
Hamdi has also been charged with violating immigration laws by not providing accurate information on his naturalization application, records show.
If convicted he faces 20 years in jail. But U.S. officials believe Hamdi has fled the country.
Hamdi was actually indicted in May, but the court documents have only recently been unsealed.
Officials have suspected for some time that Hamdi was linked with bin Laden, the Saudi terrorist who masterminded the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. They believe he delivered a satellite phone battery to bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998.
Bin Laden, the U.S. believes, then used the phone to plan and coordinate the 1998 deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in the African nations of Tanzania and Kenya. Hundreds were killed and injured in the bombings.
Hamdi’s alleged ties to bin Laden were detailed in court records and in testimony to Congress.
In 2002 Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told a Senate committee that information about Hamdi was uncovered when the U.S. offices of several Saudi organizations were raided in Northern Virginia in March 2002.
One of the organizations was the International Institute for Islamic Thought, or IIIT.
“Tarik Hamdi, an IIIT employee, personally provided bin Laden with the battery for the satellite phone prosecutors at the New York trial of the East African embassy bombers described ‘as the phone bin Laden and other(s) will used to carry about their war against the United States’,” Levitt told the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, according to a copy of his testimony.
U.S. investigators believe Hamdi gave the phone to a bin Laden lieutenant while he was in Afghanistan trying to arrange an interview with the terrorist leader for ABC News.
GlobalTerrorAlert.com, which tracks news and information on terrorist activities and investigations, has posted information that Hamdi’s name also surfaced in the federal trial against bin Laden in the Southern District of New York.
The U.S. put bin Laden on trial in 2002 for the embassy bombings. Court transcripts also detail the allegations related to Hamdi’s interaction with bin Laden’s terrorist network.
Web site transcripts from the trial show that Hamdi acted as an intermediary to get the battery pack into bin Laden’s hands.
“During this trip (to Afghanistan) Hamdi delivered a replacement battery pack purchased in the U.S. for bin Laden’s satellite telephone,” according to the Web site. “The same telephone was subsequently used by (bin Laden) to confer with his followers across the world, including to deliver the order to carry out the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.”
