Three citizens of the West African country of Mali will soon go on trial here in the United States on charges of conspiracy to commit acts of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Oumar Issa, Harouna Toure, and Idriss Abelrahman were arrested on December 16 in Ghana after they allegedly agreed to transport cocaine through West and North Africa to Europe for al-Qaida, al-Qaida in the Islamic Magreb and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia known as FARC.
The three organizations have been designated by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist groups. Lou Milione, supervisory special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said the arrests were made after a series of undercover meetings. “In the complaint, it lays out that there were series of undercover meetings where there were audio and video recordings, And during those negotiations, our undercovers, one of them presented himself as a member of the FARC. And the other undercover presented themselves as a Lebanese sympathizer or Islamic sympathizer and also anti-American,” he said.
