KUWAIT CITY, Dec 29: The detention renewal judge extended for another 14 days the detention of 12 out of 21 defendants, including four money changers, in the Hezbollah Cell case for the fourth time, reports Al-Seyassah daily. The 12 defendants and their lawyers were present in the recent session.
one night i was finishing up some work. very late in the office. probably everyone was gone. i went outside my office and saw an agent there doing some paperwork. i introduced myself and we started speaking. bob caught me at a good time. i had spent the first 11 years of my fbi career working criminal cases, despite the fact i had been an intelligence officer in the army, had travelled extensively throughout the middle east, had arabic language training, the bureau put me to work on criminal squads. rich had just come off a very successful cycle gang prosecution. this is exactly how i viewed this hezbollah cell. all the things we see in a terrorist cell you see in an outlaw motorcycle gang. that s why i needed an agency that understood both lives. right off the bat i m like we got a rico case. there his expertise were cases involving influence
corrupt organizations, rico cases in which you group together individuals and prosecute them in that manner. these people were affiliated because of their membership in hezbollah. because they were engaged in criminality, they were vulnerable to the use of criminal statutes, to and including the racketeering statutes. that was their achilles heel, because in no other manner could we attack them except through criminal prosecution. by prosecuting them for racketeering, they ll no longer ever have the chance to set that bomb off in the united states. to investigate the breadth of their criminal activity, we put together what i call a defacto joint terrorism tack force. was it funded? no, was it official? no. but it was our task force. so we effectively developed this network to counter the hezbollah network. from the diplomatic security service from the immigration and naturalization service, from the charlotte police department, to all end their jurisdiction in a common effort.
and that operative was mohammed hammoud. who gave you the tip? we can t disclose that. at this time it s still classified. with this information, i contacted the charlotte office and they initiated an investigation on this individual. they started coming across more individuals in charlotte working together that seemed to have some kind of group. as we got more intelligence from overseas, we started seeing that this could be a hezbollah cell. no one would be looking for them here. this is not new york. this is not los angeles. this is charlotte, north carolina, the heart of america. when the vacancy for the terrorism supervisor in north carolina opened up, i applied for a position and was selected. there is skepticism on the part of our headquarters and everyone kind of chuckled because terrorism was so far from the minds of the fbi.
very specific time, i thought we had enough criminal information to dismantle this hezbollah cell. at that time i said, let s take it down. so rick begins preparing an after the f affidavit for searches. we drafted a 100-page affidavit. it was one of the longer affidavits we drafted. we were biker gangs, we were killing with the rico statute. one of the things before we indicted a rico case is go hit their clubhouse and find indicia of an organization doing things together to commit criminal acts. so we fashioned the search warrant so that we can seize evidence that would support a rico prosecution and support a materials support prosecution. rick assured me that, bob, we can make this rico case. we re not sure about the material support. but this was is very best opportunity that the fbi, that the united states had to successfully prosecute them in