The Benevolence International Foundation (Benevolence International Fund in Canada, Bosanska Idealna Futura in Bosnia) (BIF) was a purported nonprofit charitable trust based in Saudi Arabia. It was a front for al-Qaeda and is now banned worldwide by the United Nations Security Council Committee 1267. It had already been banned by the US Department of the Treasury.
It was founded by Adel bin Abdul-Jalil Batterjee (Arabic: عادل بن عبد الجليل بترجي) of Jeddah, who is now personally embargoed by the UN and by the US. After pleading guilty in U.S. Federal Court, BIF's chief executive officer Enaam Arnaout began serving a ten-year sentence for racketeering in 2003.
BIF's offices had been in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo and Zenica), Canada, China, Croatia, Georgia (Duisi and Tbilisi), the Netherlands, Pakistan (Islamabad, Peshawar), the Palestinian Territories, Russia (Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Moscow), Saudi Arabia (Riyadh and Jeddah), Sudan, Tajikistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yemen.
The group stated that it was "helping those afflicted by wars. BIF first provides short-term relief such as emergency food distribution, and then moves on to long term projects providing education and self-sufficiency to the children, widowed, refugees, injured and staff of vital governmental institutions."
The list of 20 main financiers of al-Qaeda, composed by Osama bin Laden in 1988 and dubbed by him the Golden Chain, was found in the Bosnia office of Benevolence International Foundation when it was raided in March 2002.
Read more about Benevolence International Foundation: History, Prosecution
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