Terrorist task force detains Richardson man

09/23/01

By STEVE McGONIGLE / The Dallas Morning News

A Richardson businessman with ties to one of Osama bin Laden's personal secretaries was taken into custody at his home Saturday by agents of a federal terrorism task force.

A federal source said Ghassan Dahduli, 41, had refused to cooperate with investigators' attempts to interview him about the attacks in New York and Washington and also was considered a flight risk.

"He was deemed to be a danger to the community, a danger to the United States, basically," said the federal source, who spoke only on the condition of remaining unnamed.

Members of Mr. Dahduli's family refused to speak with reporters after he was handcuffed and taken from home by federal agents. An attorney who has represented Mr. Dahduli, Karen Pennington, could not be reached.

Mr. Dahduli, a former employee and top local officer of the Islamic Association for Palestine, a Richardson educational group that Israel has labeled a front for the militant Hamas movement, has been fighting efforts by U.S. immigration agents to deport him for obtaining a work visa through fraud.

Supporters of Mr. Dahduli have branded his attempted removal as a political witch hunt not based on any evidence of criminal activity.

Mr. Dahduli, a Palestinian, had been free on bond pending the outcome of an immigration court hearing next month on his application for political asylum. His bond was revoked Friday, the federal source said.

"We're not proclaiming that he was a co-conspirator" in the New York and Pentagon attacks, the source said. "We're just saying in light of the totality of the circumstances, his bond has been revoked."

Earlier this year, Mr. Dahduli's name surfaced in address book records introduced at the trial of Wadih el Hage, a former Arlington resident who worked as personal secretary to Mr. bin Laden in the mid-1990s.

Mr. el Hage is awaiting sentencing after being convicted along with three other bin Laden associates of participating in a worldwide terrorist conspiracy by the multimillionaire Saudi exile to murder Americans.

Mr. Dahduli lived in Tucson, Ariz., during the same period in the late 1980s when Mr. el Hage also resided there. Mr. Dahduli ran an Islamic Association for Palestine office from the same Tucson mosque that Mr. el Hage attended. He moved to Richardson with the IAP office in 1990, around the time Mr. el Hage moved to Arlington.

Mr. Dahduli is the second person acquainted with Mr. el Hage who is known to have been questioned by federal investigators since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The other associate was Moataz Al-Hallak, a former religious leader of the Islamic Society of Arlington mosque, which Mr. el Hage attended. Mr. Al-Hallak also participated in business deals with Mr. el Hage and found him a job at a Fort Worth tire store.

Mr. Al-Hallak moved to Laurel, Md., last year after the governing board of the Arlington mosque declined to renew his employment contract because of differences over his conservative Islamic philosophy.

Earlier this week, a federal prosecutor questioned Mr. Al-Hallak for three hours about his knowledge of the recent terrorist attacks. The cleric has said he knew nothing about them. He was not arrested, although his attorney said the FBI threatened to take Mr. Al-Hallak into custody as a material witness.

Mr. Dahduli is a longtime member of the Dallas Central Mosque in Richardson, where he was also employed for four years as an operations manager, according to a resume he published on the Internet.

Among Mr. Dahduli's other jobs was a brief stint in 1997 at InfoCom Corp., a Richardson Internet services business that was searched earlier this month by the same federal terrorism task force that took him into custody Saturday.

The FBI has declined to state the motive for the InfoCom search, but court records show that the wife of the former political leader of Hamas invested $250,000 in InfoCom, which is owned by her cousins.

InfoCom's owners and attorneys have said that the company is engaged in only legal activities and that they expect to be cleared of wrongdoing.