- NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New
York Jewish diamond dealer pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that he
unwittingly handled a $30,000 payment for smugglers of a shoulder-fired
anti-aircraft missile who intended to shoot down U.S. airliners.
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- Yehuda Abraham, 76, could be fined up to $250,000 and
sentenced to up to five years in prison for operating an unlicensed money
transmitting business, according to the U.S. Attorney in Newark, New Jersey.
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- Abraham was arrested last August in an FBI sting operation
that also netted a British arms dealer charged with trying to sell the
missile to an FBI informant at a hotel near the Newark International Airport.
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- Abraham told a U.S. District Court judge in Newark, New
Jersey, that he had received $30,000 from the informant who had agreed
to buy the missile. He said he did not know and did not ask what the $30,000
payment was to be used for when he accepted it at his business office in
New York in October 2002, and wired the payment to a bank in Hong Kong.
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- Abraham told Judge Katharine Hayden that he had been
prepared to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in a separate arms
smuggling deal with the same people without knowing that it involved arms.
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- He will be sentenced on July 19 and remains in custody,
along with Moinudden Ahmed Hameed, whom prosecutors describe as another
financial middleman who did not know he was involved in transactions involving
illegal weapons.
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- Prosecutors said Hameed, who is charged with conspiring
to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, arrived from Malaysia
as part of the alleged planned sale of 50 more missiles. They said he and
Abraham were to collect an initial payment of about $500,000 from the informant.
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- The arms dealer, Hemant Lakhani, 69, has pleaded not
guilty to charges that he tried to sell the shoulder-fired missile. Prosecutors
have added charges that he offered to procure anti-aircraft guns, tanks,
armored personnel carriers, radar systems and a "dirty bomb."
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- Prosecutors have not provided details of the "dirty
bomb" charge, but the term is usually used to describe a device designed
to spread radioactive or chemical agents.
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- The prosecutor, U.S. attorney Christopher Christie, has
described Lakhani as an arms dealer who wanted Americans to be attacked
and killed. U.S. authorities said Russian officials had cooperated with
their international investigation into arms smuggling.
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- Lakhani's lawyer, Henry Klingeman, has said his client
was "not a terrorist" but a businessman who had traded in women's
clothing from London for 40 years, and was drawn into conversations about
weapons with an FBI informant.
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