Subpoenas served after terrorism task force raid on Internet company

09/07/2001

By STEVE McGONIGLE / The Dallas Morning News

RICHARDSON – A federal grand jury has subpoenaed business records from two Richardson-based Palestinian organizations whose Web sites are hosted by a company raided Wednesday by a terrorism task force, representatives for the organizations said Thursday.

The subpoenas signal that a federal grand jury wants the records as part of an ongoing investigation, said Paul Coggins, who was U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas until February.

Rafeeq Jaber, national president of the Islamic Association for Palestine, and Dalell Mohamed, communications director of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, said their organizations were served with papers on Wednesday after the federal terrorism task force began a search at the Richardson headquarters of InfoCom Corp.

Mr. Jaber and Ms. Mohamed said the subpoenas requested all records that their organizations had that pertained to their business with InfoCom. An attorney for the Holy Land Foundation said it was given until Oct. 6 to comply.

Jim Jacks, the assistant U.S. attorney who is overseeing the federal investigation of InfoCom, did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Federal agents have said the InfoCom search is part of a two-year investigation, but they have declined to state a motive for the raid or what is being sought.

Mark Enoch, an attorney for InfoCom whose firm has also represented Holy Land Foundation, said federal agents will not find any evidence of criminal activity in their search.

"If they think they're going to find that InfoCom is somehow associated with terrorism, they're wrong. It's not," Mr. Enoch said.

InfoCom, a small, privately held Internet services business that hosts 500 Web sites worldwide, was raided early Wednesday by dozens of federal agents. The search continued Thursday and is not likely to be completed before sometime Friday, an FBI spokeswoman said.

"We are trying to finish up either late tonight or early tomorrow morning. We are working as fast and as efficiently as we can," Special Agent Lori Bailey said Thursday.

Agents have carried boxes of materials from the InfoCom office, which is located at 630 International Parkway, directly across from the Holy Land Foundation's headquarters.

Ms. Mohamed and attorneys for the foundation have said their organization is not part of the federal investigation of InfoCom. They said the foundation's only ties to InfoCom are to its Internet business and its board chairman, Ghassan Elashi, who is also a vice president at InfoCom.

The foundation's representatives said their business is providing humanitarian aid to needy people around the world. They denounced allegations by Israel and some terrorism experts that the foundation is tied to Hamas, a militant Palestinian group designated as terrorist by the U.S. government.

Officers of four national Islamic organizations criticized the raid at a news conference outside InfoCom's offices as an "anti-Muslim witch hunt" based on false information from Israel.

"To see our government act on the basis of suspicion and information provided by special interest groups, it takes us back to the McCarthy era, which I believe is scary to all Americans," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Ms. Bailey said religion and ethnicity had no role in the federal task force's operations.

"We are conducting a criminal investigation, and we are not in the practice of targeting any group of people," she said.

Khalid Hamideh, an attorney for Holy Land Foundation who said he was speaking on behalf of North Texas Muslim organizations, said the community is united in support of InfoCom and the foundation.

"We hope and pray, as people of faith, as Muslims in this community, that the American justice system exonerates the people of InfoCom, and this federal impaneled grand jury in Dallas, Texas, will once and for all and forever put to rest this innuendo, this hearsay, these rumors about the Holy Land Foundation," Mr. Hamideh said.