The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is probing suspected links between a leader of hardline Hurriyat leader, Firdous Ahmad Shah, and one of the financiers of 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, the Lok Sabha was told on Tuesday.
MoS for Home Haribhai Parathibhai Chaudhary said the ED had filed a prosecution complaint against two people under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act after the J&K police filed a charge-sheet under anti-terror law UAPA. “The prosecution complaint filed by the ED does not disclose any links of the two accused with the financing of 26/11 Mumbai terror attack. However, the ED is conducting further investigations in the matter,” the minister said.
The ED, which had filed its charge-sheet on July 16 this year in a money-laundering case in Kashmir, has alleged that Shah, chairman of the Democratic Political Movement, had received over Rs 3 crore between 2007 and 2010.
The money was received from ‘Madina Trading’ located in Brescia, Italy, and the sender was claimed to be Javed Iqbal, a resident of PoK. However, after Italian police arrested two Pakistani nationals in 2009, it was alleged that the firm had made nearly 300 transfers in the name of Iqbal, who probably had never set his foot in Italy.
The Italian police, while concluding the probe, had said the Brescia-based company had made several transfers using the identity of totally innocent, unsuspecting people, whose identity cards or passports may have been stolen.
The name of Madina Trading had cropped up during the investigation of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, when it was found that the second payment of $229 was wired to Callphonex via Western Union Money Transfer receipt number 8364307716-0 for activating the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) used during the terror strikes.
The sender of this payment was Javed Iqbal and he had used Western Union Money Transfer agent Madina Trading to make the payment to Callphonex.
Shah, a member of Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s Hurriyat Conference, had denied the allegation and said that the matter was in the court.