report on bdnews24.com, Mar 31, 2018 at 23.49hrs
A United States court has sentenced a man, who received money from a UK-Bangladeshi firm run by a planner of the Islamic State terror group, to 20 years in jail.
Mohamed Elshinawy, 33, from Edgewood of Maryland, had pleaded guilty in August last year to receiving money from the terror group in the summer of 2015.
Judge Ellen Hollander of the federal court said on Friday that she heard little remorse from Elshinawy, reports The Baltimore Sun.
While she said it was clear to her Elshinawy wanted to commit an attack, the judge said she wasn’t sure it would ever be known how close he came.
“He was playing with a very sophisticated group of people,” the newspaper quoted Judge Hollander as saying.
Fifteen years of supervised release will follow Elshinawy’s jail term.
Joshua Treem, one of the lawyers for Elshinawy, said he expects to appeal the sentence.
Elshinawy’s legal team had fought unsuccessfully to stop the judge from using enhanced sentencing guidelines that are applied in terrorism cases, The Baltimore Sun says.
Rachel Rowe, Elshinawy’s wife, said they divorced after a year of their marriage but then got married again.
“I love Mohamed so much,” she is quoted as saying in The Baltimore Sun report.
While Rowe spoke, Elshinawy looked away. But once the sentence was issued, he turned back to her and smiled, according to the report.
FBI agents and analysts who worked on the case packed the Baltimore courtroom for a hearing that lasted most of the day. They hugged in the corridor outside once the sentence was handed down, the newspaper said.
Federal prosecutor Christine Manuelian said that Elshinawy was tied to major ISIS figures in the Middle East and Europe.
“The FBI in Baltimore did their job and stopped an attack from occurring,” Manuelian said.
Global terror money network
The case — which touched three continents — is the only known example of the Syrian group sending money to an operative in the United States, and the sentence is among the longest issued in a Maryland terrorism case, according to The Baltimore Sun.
Elshinawy was born in the US but grew up in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The FBI agents’ discovery in 2015 of funds making their way to Elshinawy set off a scramble inside the bureau.
Investigators scrubbed through Elshinawy’s contacts, finances and social media posts to try to understand what might be going on.
They eventually tied Elshinawy to an ISIS-supporting friend from Egypt named Tamer El-Khodary, uncovering voluminous online chats between the two men. In one, Elshinawy said he had pledged allegiance to ISIS and asked El-Khodary to pass on the message to the group’s supreme leader.
Investigators also linked Elshinawy to a British and Bangladeshi company run by a planner with the terror group.
That company was used to send most of the $8,700 Elshinawy admitted receiving.
Agents approached Elshinawy in July 2015, and he agreed to talk to them, but Manuelian said they didn’t make an arrest not to disrupt British authorities’ investigation into the company over there.
But in December, the planner who owned the British-Bangladeshi company was killed while fighting with ISIS and Elshinawy was taken into custody.
Earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported Elshinawy was part of a global network stretching from Britain to Bangladesh that used similar schemes to fund Islamic State and was directed by a now-dead senior ISIS figure in Syria, Siful Sujan, according to the FBI affidavit, filed in federal court in Baltimore.
Sujan was killed in a drone strike on Dec 10, 2015, according to a person familiar with the matter. At the time, Sujan was Islamic State’s director of computer operations, according to the affidavit.
The financial network, according to the FBI affidavit, operated by a British technology company founded by Sujan. His company had offices in Bangladesh, and Sujan also was setting up a branch in Turkey, according to the affidavit.
Sujan’s company, which built websites and “obtained and configured printers,” spent $18,000 to buy, from a Canadian company, military-grade surveillance equipment that could be used for aerial targeting, according to the affidavit. It also ordered electronic bug-sweeping equipment from a US company to be sent to Turkey, the affidavit said.
Elshinawy received a total of $8,700 from individuals associated with Islamic State, according to the affidavit, including five payments through PayPal from Sujan’s company.
The Rapid Action Battalion in Bangladesh said they arrested eight employees of WAHMI, a technology firm in Dhaka, on Sept 23 last year.
WAHMI was founded at the same time with Spain-based technology firm ISYNKTEL by former employees of IBACS, a British technology company founded by Sujan, the elite force said.
It also said Spain arrested Sujan’s brother Ataul Haque, the chairman of ISYNKTEL, the same day.https://bdnews24.com/world/2018/03/31/man-who-received-money-from-uk-bangladeshi-firm-with-isis-links-jailed-for-20-years-in-us
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