Documents declassified at a trial of a suspected terrorist show that millions of dollars in CIA funds fell into the hands of al-Qaeda in 2010. The money was used by Afghan officials in a ransom payment.
It’s deja vu all over again, Yogi Berra might say. Once again, US money funneled through the CIA into the Middle East has ended up being used against… well, the US, Sputnik reported.
Correspondence made public at the trial of Abid Naseer, a Pakistani al-Qaeda operative convicted in Brooklyn of supporting terrorism and conspiring to bomb a British shopping center.
They were originally obtained by federal authorities in the famous raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by Seal Team Six in which the US’s most wanted was killed.
In this particular case, the money was used by Afghanistan to retrieve one of their diplomats who had been abducted by al-Qaeda. At $5 million, the ransom for Abdul Khaliq Farahi, Afghanistan’s soon-to-be ambassador to Pakistan, was too high for Kabul. So, they raided a bank account holding CIA money used to make cash payments to the president, Hamid Karzai, a capricious US ally.
The funds were obtained by al-Qaeda after a successful series of drone campaigns had decimated much of their ranks. However, the money would imbue a new life into the organization and likely went to buy new caches of weapons.
