Palestinian smuggler linked to 1994 Brooklyn terror attack

One of 16 Palestinians arrested in a cigarette-smuggling ring was linked to the 1994 murder of yeshiva student Ari Halberstam in a terror attack on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Muaffaq Askar, who was arrested late last week in New York in a plot that is believed to have cost the state millions of dollars in lost revenue, has long been suspected of supplying Rashid Baz with the guns he used to attack a minivan full of yeshiva students. Baz reportedly called Askar his “Palestinian uncle. ”

Halberstam, 16, was killed in the bridge attack.

“I was very well aware of Askar since my son was murdered and the role he played in my son’s case,” Halberstam’s mother, Devorah, told the Forward. “I know he’s been traveling to Jordan back and forth like a free man with my son’s blood on his hands.”

Baz, an immigrant from Lebanon, shot at the minivan on March 1, 1994, reportedly in retaliation for the murder earlier that year of 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron by a Brooklyn immigrant to Israel, Baruch Goldstein.

The traffickers also had alleged links to other known terrorists, including Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind cleric serving a life sentence for conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks. That combination has raised concerns about where the money went.

“We know they made they made tens of millions of dollars but so far we’ve only found a fraction of that,” state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said while announcing enterprise corruption and other charges against 16 people, all Palestinian immigrants.

Two reputed ringleaders, brothers Basel and Samir Ramadan, were arrested Wednesday in Maryland. Investigators found $1.5 million — some stashed in black plastic garbage bags — in the home and car of Basel Ramadan, authorities said.

A yearlong investigation found that the Ramadans and other suspects formed a distribution chain that began with the purchase of mass quantities of cigarettes from a Virginia wholesaler, authorities said. The cigarettes were hidden in a public storage facility in Delaware, where distributors picked up about 20,000 cartons a week for sale at markets throughout New York City and at grocery stores in upstate New York.

Schneiderman and city Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters that similar schemes in the past have raised money for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

“This is not the end of our investigation,” the attorney general added. “We are following the money. We will work to track it down wherever it went.”