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By: Fern Sidman
In a shocking bombshell of a lawsuit, families of two members of the US military who were killed by explosive devices planted by the terror group Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, claim that a bank based in New York provided financing to Al Qaeda in spite of the fact that government officials issued warnings not to do so under any circumstances.
In a report on Sunday, the New York Post said that the lawsuit was filed on Tuesday in Manhattan federal court against Standard Charted Bank. Those filing the suit were relatives of two US service men who were killed by the Al Qaeda deadly bomb on April 6, 2013 in Afghanistan.
The court filing indicated that the families of Wilbel Robles-Santa, 25, of Puerto Rico, and Christopher Ward, 24, of Tennessee, claim the bank provided financial services to the Fatima Group in Pakistan despite knowing it was sending “an unending supply” of calcium ammonium nitrate — the primary component in IEDs — to Al Qaeda, as was reported by the Post.
This is not the first time that Standard Chartered Bank has been sued for aiding and abetting terrorism that claimed the lives of US military personnel. In August of 2021, a report was published in The Hindustan Times that said that families of US soldiers and civilians, who were killed or severely wounded in Afghanistan, had sued Standard Chartered Bank as well as the Deutsche Bank and Danske Bank, for helping terrorists carry out their attacks. The lawsuit, which was filed in August 2021 in a federal court in Brooklyn, New York by 115 Gold Star families or relatives of American military service members killed in Afghanistan and relatives of noncombatants, claimed they “knowingly facilitated transfers of millions” of dollars that provided aid to terrorists in the region.
According to the 2021 lawsuit, transactions involving syndicate agents, operatives and fronts in countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) raised red flags that they were dealing with terrorist money, as was reported by The Hindustan Times.
“The terrorists used defendants’ laundromats to change dirty money into clean money and convert dirty foreign currency into clean US dollars. Defendants knew they were aiding terrorism and yet did so anyway,” they said in the 2021 complaint.
The complainants include civilians, members of the military and families of people killed or wounded in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2016, according to the report in The Hindustan Times. They claim Americans were attacked by a terrorist syndicate led by al Qaeda and the Haqqani Network, an extreme faction of the Taliban.
The case was dismissed on Jan. 3, 2023, but is under appeal in the Manhattan-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The recent court papers also indicate that senior bankers at the Manhattan office of Standard Chartered Bank met with US government officials in 2013, the Post reported. The officials exhorted the bankers cease and desist in providing aid for the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks. The bank’s response was “utterly useless,” the court filing claimed.
The Post also reported that the Anti-Terrorism Act lawsuit alleges that “Standard Chartered knowingly and wantonly sacrificed American lives to increase its own profits.”
In December of 2019, the Daily Mail of the UK reported that Lieutenant General Mike Barbero was the U.S. official who tried to warn the banks about its dealings with the Fatima Group, as was reported by the Post.
In a press release issued by the US Department of Justice on April 9, 2019, it stated that Standard Chartered Bank admitted to illegally processing transactions in violation of Iranian sanctions and agreed to pay more than $1 billion. It added that an Iranian national was indicted and a former SCB employee pleaded guilty for criminal conspiracy to violate Iranian sanctions.
