New Jersey Candidate Reportedly Volunteered For Humanitarian Group Later Found To Be Affiliated With Al Qaida
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that at the time of Hamawy’s work with BIF, was not suspected of having any ties to Al Qaida, and the organization was praised by a U.S. Envoy. We regret not including…
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that at the time of Hamawy’s work with BIF, was not suspected of having any ties to Al Qaida, and the organization was praised by a U.S. Envoy. We regret not including those facts.
New Jersey Democratic House candidate Adam Hamawy worked for an nonprofit in the 1990s that was later investigated as an Al-Qaida affiliate before it was shut down.
Hamawy said in a 1996 interview that he had passed out humanitarian supplies around Bosnia two years earlier for the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), the Jewish Insider reported, citing the archived story from the Newark Star-Ledger. At the time, there were no indications BIF was affiliated with Al Qaida, and a U.S. government envoy praised the humanitarian work of the organization.
The U.S. government and United Nations (UN) later identified the Illinois-based foundation as a clandestine funding source for Al-Qaida and 9/11 architect Osama bin Laden.
No evidence has emerged that Hamawy was in contact with Al-Qaida himself or participated in anything other than humanitarian work for BIF.
“I worked in Sarajevo for 10 days and then the rest in Zenica, a large regional center in central Bosnia,” Hamawy, who was born in Egypt, reportedly told the paper at the time. “We went out to hospitals around the area and in the mountains to check what supplies they needed and we tried to deliver them.”