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Muslim charity group's leaders convicted

DALLAS, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- A federal jury in Dallas found five men with ties to a major Muslim charity guilty of dozens of criminal charges involving funding the Hamas terrorist group.

The verdicts were handed down Monday against former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Texas organization once ranked as the country's largest Muslim charitable organization, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The government charged at least $12 million raised in the United States was channeled to Hamas after the organization was banned as a terrorist group.

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Supporters of the five defendants said the government's case was built on fear-mongering and asserted Holy Land was a legitimate charity that provided relief to Palestinians living in need, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Holy Land and its leadership had been investigated since the early 1990s. President George Bush announced the foundation had been shut down in 2001 and indictments were issued in 2004. A first trial ended in a mistrial, the Morning News recapped.

"For many years, the Holy Land Foundation used the guise of charity to raise and funnel millions of dollars to the infrastructure of the Hamas terror organization," J. Patrick Rowan, assistant attorney general for national security, told the Post. "This prosecution demonstrates our resolve to ensure that humanitarian relief efforts are not used as a mechanism to disguise and enable support for terrorist groups."

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