{{A Somali terror leader implored his fellow countryman in California to send money ‘to finance jihad,” triggering a chain of events that ended with four convictions.}}<\/p>\n
U.S. government agents recorded dozens of such calls a few years ago, according to the Department of Justice.<\/p>\n
And on Friday, a jury found four Somali nationals guilty of supporting terrorism in their native country.<\/p>\n
The verdict came after prosecutors played the recordings to jurors in a San Diego federal court during weeks of trial.<\/p>\n
The four, who included an imam and a cab driver, had raised $10,000 and wired it to the Islamist terrorist group Al-Shabaab, according to the original indictment.<\/p>\n
Cab driver Basaaly Saeed Moalin had many phone conversations with former Al-Shabaab leader Aden Hashi Ayrow, before a U.S. missile strike ended the latter’s life in May 2008.<\/p>\n
Investigators from the FBI, Homeland Security and a San Diego anti-terror agency recorded dozens of them.<\/p>\n
Federal prosecutors filed charges in November 2011. The group pleaded not guilty. But the recordings convinced the jurors otherwise.<\/p>\n
The money wasn’t coming fast enough for Ayrow, who implored Moalin in at least one recorded call to hurry it up. <\/p>\n
“You are running late with the stuff,” Ayrow told him. “Send some, and something will happen.”<\/p>\n
Ayrow pushed the cab driver to get his local imam to come up with some funds. <\/p>\n
Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud ran the City Heights mosque in San Diego, which many in the Somali community attended.<\/p>\n
Together with a second cab driver, Ahmed Nasiri Taalil Mohamud, and an employee at a money transfer company, Issa Doreh, they raised the cash and wired it to Al-Shabaab , the Justice Department said.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t the only favor Moalin did for the terror group.<\/p>\n
Moalin had kept a house in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu, one of the world’s most embattled cities at the time. <\/p>\n
He offered to let the terrorists use it, the Department of Justice said.<\/p>\n
“After you bury your stuff deep in the ground, you would, then, plant trees on top,” Moalin told Ayrow in a recorded conversation. <\/p>\n
Prosecutors argued he was “offering a place to hide weapons.”<\/p>\n
For months, they talked about “bullets, bombing and Jihad,” said U. S. Attorney Laura E. Duffy. <\/p>\n
After hearing the recordings, the jury no longer bought the defendants’ explanation that they “were actually conversations about their charitable efforts for orphans and schools,” she said.<\/p>\n
Sentencing is scheduled for May 16.<\/p>\n
Al-Shabaab is one of about 50 groups that have been designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.<\/p>\n
The Islamist extremists have been waging a war against Somalia’s government in an effort to implement a stricter form of Islamic law, or sharia.<\/p>\n
In recent years, Somali and African Union troops, who have received funding from the U.S. government, have won many battles against the terror group, pushing it back to a handful of strongholds.<\/p>\n
For more than 20 years, Somalia did not have a stable government, and fighting between the rebels and government troops added to the impoverished east African nation’s humanitarian crisis.<\/p>\n
In January, the United States granted official recognition to the Somali government in Mogadishu.<\/p>\n
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