'Money trail'
leads from Mexico border straight to Mideast, Watchdog cites wire transfers to smugglers
Just a few months after six
Middle Eastern men who entered the U.S. illegally through Mexico were arrested
in Arizona state, authorities have now uncovered a “disturbing money trail”
between terror-sponsoring countries and Mexico, according to a Judicial
Watch report.
This includes more than
a dozen wire transfers sent from the Middle East to known Mexican smugglers in
at least two different regions of Mexico, Judicial Watch reported, citing
information from the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
“A report issued by the AG exposes the disturbing money trail between
Mexico and terrorist nations in the Middle East as well as evidence of
smuggling routes tying the region to America’s southern border,” Judicial Watch
reported.
WND reported nearly a year ago on Judicial Watch’s findings that ISIS had
established a camp inside Mexico just a few miles from the Texas border.
An excerpt of the AG’s
new findings was published by a local media outlet this week.
It states that the city
of Tapachula, a known human smuggling hub near the Guatemalan border in the
Mexican state of Chiapas, was the top destination of Middle Eastern money
transfers.
Nogales, adjacent to the
Arizona border in northern Mexico, is the second destination, the investigation
found.
“Agents conducted a
comprehensive geographic analysis of possible terrorist related transactions
and/or money transfers involving human smuggling networks,” the state report
says.
Officials launched the
probe shortly after six men – one from Afghanistan and five from Pakistan –
were arrested in Patagonia, a quaint ranching town that sits 20 miles north of
Nogales, on Nov. 17, 2015.
Judicial Watch
investigated the matter as part of an ongoing probe on the dire
national-security issues created by the notoriously porous southern border.
Special Agent Kurt Remus
in the FBI’s Phoenix headquarters told JW that the agency’s Joint Terrorism
Task Forces vetted and interviewed the six men and determined that there were
“no obvious signs of terrorism” so they were returned to the custody of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.
But a few days later, in
a story first reported by JW, five young Middle Eastern men were apprehended in
the nearby Arizona town of Amado, which sits about 30 miles from the Mexican
border.
Two of the Middle
Eastern men were carrying stainless-steel cylinders in backpacks, law
enforcement and other sources told JW, alarming Border Patrol officials enough
to call the Department of Homeland Security for backup.
Only three of the men’s
names were entered in the Border Patrol’s E3 reporting system, which is used by
the agency to track apprehensions, detention hearings and removals of illegal
immigrants. E3 also collects and transmits biographic and biometric data
including fingerprints for identification and verification of individuals
encountered at the border. The other two men were listed as “unknown subjects,”
which is unheard of, according to a JW federal law enforcement source. “In all
my years I’ve never seen that before,” a veteran federal law enforcement agent
told JW.
“The money trail exposed
by Arizona officials in the aftermath of these two major incidents is extremely
troublesome,” Judicial Watch concluded. The AG’s Financial Crimes Task Force
quickly identified suspicious wire transfers sent from Middle Eastern and
African nations by people with Middle Eastern names to Mexico. In 2015, one
human smuggler in Mexico received 70 money transfers from 69 senders, the task
force found.
“All of the 69 sender
names appeared to be of Middle Eastern origin,” the AG writes in its report.
This seems to confirm JW’s reporting in the last few years on the dangerous
alliance between Mexican smugglers and Middle Eastern extremists who want to
attack the U.S.
Last summer JW reported on a Mexican drug cartel operation that
smuggles foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas town
near El Paso.
They use remote farm
roads – rather than interstates – to elude the Border Patrol and other law
enforcement barriers, according to sources on both sides of the Mexico-U.S.
border.
The foreign nationals
are then transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads around 54
miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20.
In April 2015 JW
reported the Islamic State, also called ISIS, is operating camps near the U.S.
border in areas known as Anapra and Puerto Palomas west of Ciudad Juárez in the
Mexican state of Chihuahua.
That warning follows
reports from Judicial Watch in recent months that four Islamic terrorists have
been captured in Texas after coming across the U.S. border from Mexico.
The warnings conflict
with claims by the Department of Homeland Security there is not an imminent
danger of ISIS breaching the nation’s southern border.
In its April 2015 report
Judicial Watch said its sources for the information about the ISIS camp include
a Mexican Army field-grade officer and a Mexican federal police inspector.
That information came
from high-level sources just months after JW exposed an ISIS plot orchestrated
from Ciudad Juárez to attack the U.S. with car bombs or other vehicle-borne
improvised explosive devices.
As a result of JW’s
reporting Fort Bliss, the U.S. Army base in El Paso, increased security. The
threat was imminent enough to place agents across a number of Homeland
Security, Justice and Defense agencies on alert.
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