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https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/s...tants-in-indonesia-finance-jihad-with-charity
JAKARTA (AFP) – Generous Indonesians donating their spare change to the poor and needy are unwittingly helping finance deadly terror attacks and militant training camps, in a scam that has netted big money for extremist groups.
Former radical Khairul Ghazali once spent his days visiting restaurants, convenience stores and supermarkets to drop off charity boxes, wearing an official-looking uniform to avoid suspicion.
Passers-by would slot in coins and crumpled banknotes in the belief that they were helping the impoverished, orphaned children or maybe a Palestinian aid organisation.
But Mr Ghazali’s boxes secretly belonged to Jemaah Islamiah (JI) – the notorious network behind Indonesia’s deadliest terror attack, the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings.
“People can’t tell the difference between these and other charity boxes,” said Mr Ghazali, 56, who now runs an Islamic boarding school and tries to deradicalise former extremists.
“The money collected is usually used to pay for terrorism.”
With little outside funding, hardline Islamist groups depend on the charity box scam to pay for operations across Indonesia, the world’s biggest Muslim-majority nation, which has suffered a series of hotel bombings and other attacks over the years.
North Sumatra police said in March they had seized more than 500 boxes suspected to be funding pipelines for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group and radicals linked to Al-Qaeda.
The seizure, weeks before an ISIS-inspired married couple blew themselves up at a church on Good Friday, was the tip of the iceberg.
A JI militant arrested last year admitted that one foundation linked to the notorious terror group was running more than 20,000 boxes nationwide, police said at the time….
