Maj Hasan may have wired money to contacts in Pak: US Congressman

Sachin Parashar, TNN 13 November 2009, 03:25am IST

NEW DELHI: Even as US agencies struggle to come up with an authoritative answer on whether or not the Fort Hood massacre in Texas was a terror attack, Congressman Peter Hoekstra has claimed to have received information from independent sources that the suspect, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, may have wired money to contacts in Pakistan suggesting that he had links with terror groups based in that country. Hoekstra, who is also a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that US agencies are probing Hasan's links in Pakistan.

Army psychiatrist Hasan had opened fire at an army post on November 5 killing 13 people and injuring another 30 before being shot himself. He is currently in hospital.

Hoekstra said in Washington on Wednesday that sources "outside of the intelligence community'' had learnt about Hasan's links with Pakistan. "They are trying to follow up on it because they recognize that if there are communications -- phone or money transfers with somebody in Pakistan -- it just raises a whole other level of questions,'' the Republican Congressman was quoted as saying by a Texas-based newspaper.

"With what I know about Hasan to date...I would expect we will learn more about him that will make us concerned, rather than information that says, Oh man, we got that all wrong and this had nothing to do with terrorism,'' he added.

There have been reports about Hasan's links with a radical anti-US Imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also associated with some 9/11 hijackers, but the FBI has so far not come up with any categorical statement on Hasan's links with terror groups. The Yemen-based Awlaki had hailed Hasan's "sacrifice'' after the shootout in an internet posting. "Hasan is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people,'' he had said in the posting.

Hoekstra, in fact, has insisted even before that what Hasan did seemed to be an act of terror and that the White House was being unnecessarily apprehensive in describing it as terror. "With everything that I've seen, I think it's a reasonable conclusion to say that at this point this guy is a radical jihadist. He was in contact with Al-Qaida and perhaps a radical Imam overseas,'' Hoekstra had said earlier.

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