More on the Indictment of Ex-US Lawmaker/Reagan Appointee

by Cockney Robin | Here's a BBC News follow-up on the Reagan appointee and UN delegate, Mark Deli Siljander, discussed here by D Cupples.

According to BBC News,  Currently, and a bit ironically, the subject of these charges is head of a Public Relations firm.  As D Cupples noted, the indictment charges that he lobbied in favour of a charity that sent money in 2003/2004---about $130,000---to accounts in Peshawar to which al-Qaeda and Taliban supporter Gulbuddin Hekmatyar---"long...a thorn in the US side in Afghanistan"--- had access. (BBC News). 

Again as noted, the charity was closed in 2004 when the US Treasury listed it as an organisation suspected of raising funds to support terrorism. (BBC News).The US Justice Department says that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has "vowed to engage in a holy war against the United States and international troops." (BBC News).  "His Hezb-e-Islami mujahideen movement helped throw out Soviet invaders and was in conflict with the Taleban when they were in power," says the article.

BBC News has a profile on Hekmatyar here.  Among other things, it says:

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Mujahideen faction, the Hezb-e-Islami, was one of the groups which helped end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. 

But in the free-for-all
that followed in the early 1990s, his group of fundamentalist Sunni
Muslim Pashtuns clashed violently with other Mujahideen factions in the
struggle for control of the capital, Kabul.

The Hezb-e-Islami was blamed for much of the terrible death and destruction of that period, which led many ordinary Afghans to welcome the emergence of the Taleban.

You can read more about him here.

OTHER BN-POLITICS POSTINGS

 

• Ex-Lawmaker & Reagan Appointee Funded Terrorists?
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