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Hizbullah members caught in the USA
By Reuters
Two 20-year-old men arrested in Ohio were being held on Thursday on
charges of money laundering on behalf of Hezbollah, authorities said.
The two men, Ali Houssaiky and Osama Abulhassan, of Dearborn, Michigan,
were apprehended on Tuesday in Marietta, Ohio, during a traffic stop and
found carrying $11,000 in cash, 12 cell phones, airline passenger lists
and information on airport security, a spokesman for the Washington County
prosecutor's office said.
Authorities said the men admitted to buying hundreds of telephones and
reselling them in Dearborn.
A map marking Wal-Mart stores from Ohio to South Carolina was also found
in their sedan, a spokesman said.
Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit with a large Arab-American population, has
been a locus of U.S. investigations into money-raising on behalf of
Hezbollah and Hamas, both groups that are on the U.S. list of terrorist
organizations.
The two men's alleged tie to Hezbollah was not detailed by authorities.
Each was being held on $200,000 bond and neither had yet entered a plea to
the charge, which carries a sentence of up to 18 months in prison.
Initially, the two men were charged with obstructing official business
because they lied to police, the spokesman said, but those charges were
dropped.
They were stopped for a turn signal violation in the central Ohio city 90
miles (145
km) southeast of Columbus.
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