New York: Kidnapping for ransom has become a global business for Al Qaeda, bankrolling its operations across the globe.
An investigation by The New York Times found that Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year. The US Treasury Department reckons the amount touching a total of $165 million over the same period.
These payments exclusively by European governments were funneled through proxies, sometimes masking it as development aid.
In its fledgling years, Al Qaeda received most of its money from deep-pocketed donors, but today Europe has become an inadvertent underwriter of Al Qaeda.
The foreign ministries of Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland denied in emails or telephone interviews that they had paid the terrorists. Several senior diplomats involved in past negotiations have described the decision to pay ransom for their countries’ citizens as an agonizing calculation: Accede to the terrorists’ demand, or allow innocent people to be killed, often in a gruesome, public way?
While in 2003 the kidnappers received around $200,000 per hostage, now they are netting up to $10 million, money that the second in command of Al Qaeda’s central leadership recently described as accounting for as much as half of his operating revenue.
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