Corporation Microsoft and its president Bill Gates are still haunted with troubles. This time the troubles don’t concern accusations of monopolization of the operating systems market. As it turned out, the corporation sponsored bin Laden.
Microsoft is not the only company blamed for financing terrorists, even popular PC producer Compaq sponsored terrorists as well. It is clear that both companies didn’t even suspect that money transferred to the charitable organization Benevolence International Foundation is spent on training of al-Qaeda terrorists. The companies transferred not very large sums of money, Microsoft’s transfer made up 20 thousand dollars. But as is known, many hands make light work.
Activity of the “charitable” foundation was organized on a wide scale. It’s enough to say that when activity of the foundation and its chairman Arnaout was investigated by the FBI, it turned out that within the four first months of 2002 Benevolence International Foundation transferred 685 thousand dollars to bank accounts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Latvia and Russia allegedly for support of Chechen refugees. But in fact the money was sent to terrorists.
American authorities paid special attention to activity of the Foundation right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In May 2002, an arrest warrant was issued for chairman of the Foundation Arnaout, native of Syria (by the moment of arrest Arnaout had dual citizenship, American and Bosnian).
The scale of Islamic “charitable” organizations’ activity is demonstrative on the whole. It was well known long before September 11 that money they collect is spent on supporting terrorist activity. But up to that moment they could operate quite legally. For instance, Benevolence International Foundation was based in Chicago since 1992, and American authorities laid no claims to activity of the organization.
As it is clear now, sources financing terrorist activity can be different. At that, special services are unlikely completely aware of the scale of this “variety”. As it turns out, bin Laden and his organization were sponsored by universally known corporations. It is not ruled out that they are still financing terrorists even now. But this time this activity is carried out not through Islamic foundations which reputation is now undermined. There are too many charitable organizations. God knows, probably money transferred to accounts of some society for animal protection is further forwarded directly to bin Laden.
Vasily Bubnov
PRAVDA.Ru
Translated by Maria Gousseva
Read the original in Russian: http://world.pravda.ru/world/2003/5/16/43/6409_blagotvoritel.html
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