BUFFALO, N.Y. — A man was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday for running an unlicensed money-transfer business that sent $5 million to Yemen. Mohamed Albanna of Lackawanna arranged the transfers from his Buffalo cigarette and candy wholesale business from 1999 to 2002.U.S. Attorney Terrance Flynn said authorities did not allege that money transferred by the business went to support terrorism but could not rule it out. Albanna, along with a brother and nephew, were arrested in December 2002, after the arrests of six other Yemeni-American men from Lackawanna who admitted to attending a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. One of the "Lackawanna Six" used the unlicensed business to send $1,500 to Kamal Derwish in March 2002, according to a ledger investigators took from the business. Derwish is believed to have been killed by a CIA missile strike in Yemen later that year.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Lynch outlined other transactions that he said would have triggered alarms at legitimate money-transfer businesses. But with no paper trail, investigators hit a dead end, he said. Albanna, a leader in Buffalo's Arab-American community, has said the money was sent from Yemeni-Americans in the United States to relatives back home. "My intention was always to assist my fellow man," he told U.S. District Judge William Skretny.