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Malaysian Company Denies Al-Qaeda Connection
Additional reporting by Kazi Mahmood, IslamOnline Correspondent
JAKARTA, Dec. 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A Malaysian-based company named in the first criminal indictment stemming from the deadly September 11 attacks denied on Wednesday having any links with indicted terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui.
The firm's owner said Moussaoui never worked for, or received money from, a Malaysian company.
A U.S. federal grand jury indicted Moussaoui on charges of conspiring to kill thousands of the people in the September 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C.
The indictment also alleges that Moussaoui received letters from the Malaysian company Infocus Tech in October last year, which stated that he was its U.S. representative and would receive a monthly allowance.
Ahmad Zaki, managing director of Infocus Tech Sdn. Bhd., said Wednesday his company never heard of Moussaoui before news of the indictment.
Infocus is a small, privately-owned company which buys computer integration systems from the local distributors of companies such as Cisco, Avaya and Natural Microsystems, and sells them to Malaysian clients, Ahmad said.
The company has eight employees - all Malaysians - and no means to support overseas staff, he said.
"We had never heard of Zacarias Moussaoui before today," Ahmad told news agencies. "We have never appointed anyone to represent us overseas. We sell U.S. products to Malaysian markets. Why would we employ someone in the U.S.?''
"We think that our company name has been misused in this matter," he added.
However, the allegation places Malaysia back in the headlines while the U.S. appears to be struggling to determine whether Southeast Asian nations had links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.
In another allegation in Jakarta, the al-Qaeda network is said to have been using the battlefield of Poso in the island of Sulawesi as a training ground.
A report said 2,000 al-Qaeda members were training in the restive province where more than 2,000 people of Muslim and Christian faith have been killed since 1999.
Indonesia has strongly denied there were any al-Qaeda networks in the country, while news published by international agencies said earlier this year that bin Laden might have had contacts with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).
Local newspapers in Indonesia also accused al-Qaeda of participating in a violent uprising against Christian headhunters in the province of Malukus. They added that the Laskar Jihad Wal Sunnah Wal Jamah was linked to bin Laden and had received weapons and funding from the Saudi dissident.
The Laskar Jihad, however, denied they had any links with the al-Qaeda network, adding that it condemned the actions of bin Laden.
Thousands of Muslims and Christians have died in the province which turned violent after an isolated incident became a religious conflict in the capital, Ambon.
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian officials have previously said that several people wanted by U.S. authorities in connection with the attacks visited Malaysia on tourist visas sometime beforehand.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also said that one of the hijackers met with a bin Laden associate and others in Malaysia in January 2000.
However, sources in Thailand said two of the hijackers actually met there with an unknown al-Qaeda associate.
Moussaoui, a 33-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent, was detained in the United States on Aug. 17 on immigration charges, after authorities became suspicious about his attempts to get flight training.
He was previously based in London, where authorities said they failed to detect him before his departure for the United States.
The 30-page indictment against Moussaoui alleges he contacted a flight school in Oklahoma using an e-mail account he set up with an internet service provider in Malaysia.
It also alleges that Moussaoui received letters from Infocus Tech stating that he was appointed the company's marketing consultant in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, and would receive an allowance of $2,500 per month.
Ahmad said Infocus Tech was a limited company, which meant that overseas payments would show up in official records. He said an investigation of company records would show that it had made no payments such as that mentioned in the U.S. indictment.
"We have never paid an allowance to anybody outside Malaysia," he said.
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