A Qatari bank and a charity organization belonging to the Persian Gulf country are trying to identify purported whistleblowers, who revealed their alleged funneling of hundreds of thousands of dollars to a judge enlisted by Daesh at the height of the Takfiri terrorist group’s bloodletting in Syria, a report says.
The Cradle online news magazine published the report on Friday, identifying the institutions in question as Qatar National Bank (QNB) and Qatar Charity (QC).
The institutions, the report said, “are attempting to uncover the identities of confidential sources that supplied documents to lawyers representing the family of murdered US journalist Steven Sotloff, which allege the financial institutions…wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to the ISIS (Daesh) judge who ordered Sotloff’s execution.”
The group beheaded Sotloff back in 2014 after it invaded Syria and neighboring Iraq, overtaking huge swathes of the Arab countries’ territories.
According to the magazine, in 2022, the victim’s family accused the Qatari institutions of wiring $800,000 to Fadhel al-Salim, an alleged Daesh judge, who reportedly ordered Sotloff’s execution.
“QNB and QC filed an application on 12 March in the US to obtain ‘limited discovery’ of the law firm representing Sotloff’s family, specifically regarding the names of those who provided the bank records” allegedly linking them to the murder, the report added.
The family accuses the Qatari institutions of funding Daesh at the time as means of trying to overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In an email to Bloomberg, however, the general counsel for the QNB said the bank “is the victim of an effort to tarnish its reputation” and plans to hold the individuals, who provided such alleged information to Sotloff family’s lawyers, “to account to the fullest extent of the law.”
The Cradle, meanwhile, identified Qatar as one of the countries “bankrolling” anti-Syria militant and terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda’s Syria branch, al-Nusra Front, “in coordination with the CIA” after 2011, when the Arab nation found itself in the grip of rampant foreign-backed and -funded violence.
