US deports to Indian engineer who helped his brother finance Al-Qaeda

The United States has of late deported to India an engineer, who was accused of and admitted to aiding in providing fund to Anwar Al-Awlaki, a key leader of the terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda, in 2009.

Ibrahim Mohammad Zubair, who originally hailed from Hyderabad in Telangana, pleaded guilty in a US federal court in April 2018 to concealment of financing terrorism. The US deported him to India on May 19 last. He was quarantined in a high-security facility in Amritsar in Punjab soon after his arrival and would be questioned by the security agencies if and when he would be tested and found negative for COVID-19, sources told DH on Thursday.

The 40-year-old had been sentenced to 60 months in prison by a federal court in Ohio in the US in April 2018 as agreed upon by him and the prosecutors in the plea agreement. He had however already spent 30 months in prison by then. The US court had ordered him to be deported after completing the remainder of his prison term.

Sources in New Delhi said that he would be grilled by the officials of the security and intelligence agencies to find out if he had any links with terrorist organizations, which were based in Pakistan and carried out attacks in India.

Ibrahim had studied engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2001 through 2005. He had moved to Toledo in Ohio in 2006 and had married a US citizen. He had become a lawful permanent resident of the US in or around 2007, according to the Justice Department of the federal government of America.

His brother Farooq Mohammad had given $ 22000 to an associate of Al-Awlaki, a key leader of the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, at Sana’a in Yemen in 2009. Ibrahim had facilitated the transfer of the money overseas for Farooq to take the fund to the associate of Awlaki in Yemen.

After the Federal Investigation Bureau (FBI) had started investigation, Ibrahim and two others, who had contributed to the fund Farooq had provided to the associate of Al-Awlaki, had attempted to conceal the source of the money by lying to investigators and deleting emails related to the transactions. They all had been arrested in 2011, along with Farooq.

Farooq had been sentenced to prison for 27 years and six months in 2017 after he had pleaded guilty pleaded guilty not only for conspiring to provide and conceal material support or resources to terrorists, but also for soliciting an undercover FBI agent posing as a hitman to kidnap and murder a US District Judge.