High-Stakes Trial Is Set Against Alleged Hamas Arm

Prosecutors are set today to take a second run at convicting officers of a Texas-based charity that the government contends was a Hamas beachhead in America, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.Jury selection in the case against five former Holy Land officials and fund-raisers is set to get under way this morning in federal court in Dallas. The first trial, last year, ended in a muddle of partial acquittals and mistrials when jurors could not reach clear verdicts after hearing two months of witness testimony and conducting almost a month of deliberations.The failure to win any convictions in a prosecution that had been publicly trumpeted by top Justice Department officials was a high-profile blow to the Bush administration’s legal strategy against alleged fund-raising in America by terrorist groups abroad. The earlier disappointment only raises the stakes for the new trial, according to legal analysts.“It’s hugely important in terms of what the overall law enforcement approach is going be for the government in the post-9/11 era,” a former federal terrorism prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, said. “It’s desperately important that we make it unambiguous that we can use the ‘material support’ statutes and go after the financial element of radical Islam.”Prosecutors contend that the Holy Land Foundation, formerly known as the Occupied Land Fund, was part of a web of groups across the globe set up on behalf of Hamas, a Palestinian Arab political movement that has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks in recent years. The indictment claims that the foundation, which once billed itself as America’s largest Muslim charity, funneled $12 million to local Palestinian relief groups, known as Zakat committees, which were under the control of Hamas.Muslim activists say that the U.S. Agency for International Development, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the United Nations funded many of the same committees supported by Holy Land, but those agencies were not targeted by prosecutors.“They’re trying to say, ‘The real crime you did is, you did feed children, but you did it with bad intentions,'” a spokesman for a group supporting the defendants, Khalil Meek of the Hungry for Justice Coalition, said. “They’re basically saying, ‘You’re Muslim American. You’re feeding kids. You’re part of the conspiracy.’ … It’s un-American. It’s kind of insane.”Facing another trial on the 2004 indictment are a chairman of the foundation’s board, Ghassan Elashi; the group’s CEO, Shukri Abu Baker; a financial manager and past chairman of the foundation, Mohammed El-Mezain; a New Jersey representative for the group, Abdulrahman Odeh, and a fund-raiser for the group, Mufid Abdulqader. The foundation itself was also indicted and will go on trial again, though the group has essentially been defunct since its assets were frozen by the American government in 2001.The second trial is to take place before Judge Jorge Solis, after Judge Allen Joe Fish, who oversaw the earlier trial, retired. A gag order from that trial is still in place, barring the defendants, defense lawyers, and prosecutors from speaking publicly about the case.Earlier this month, at the prosecution’s request, the court dropped 29 counts each against Messrs. Odeh and Abdulqader. The counts, charging money laundering and providing aid to a terrorist group, pertained to individual financial transfers to the zakat committees. All the defendants are still charged with conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization and all but Mr. El-Mezain, who was largely acquitted at the other trial, face other serious charges as well.At the first trial, two Israeli officials testified under pseudonyms and with many spectators cleared from the courtroom. This time, Mr. McCarthy said he expects prosecutors will buttress and perhaps even downplay some of the evidence from Israel. “I would suspect they will not rely as much on the Israeli intelligence side and try to do what they can with American witnesses,” he said. Some close to the defense criticized the earlier prosecution as “an Israeli trial tried on American soil.”At least two of the defendants have family ties to senior Hamas figures. Elashi is a brother-in-law of the deputy chairman of the political bureau of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Mr. Abdulqader is a half-brother of the head of Hamas’s political operation, Khaled Meshaal.The freedom of most of the defendants is riding on the outcome of the re-trial. However, Elashi is already serving a prison sentence of more than six years after being found guilty in earlier trials of export law violations and of conspiring to send money to Abu Marzook, who was officially listed as a terrorist by the American government when it banned dealings with Hamas in 1995. Elashi is set for release in 2013.

High-Stakes Trial Is Set Against Alleged Hamas Arm

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