A leading UK Muslim charity linked to a Tayside man suspected of raising funds for al Qaida has denied supporting any illegal activities.
The 1st Ethical Charitable Trust spoke to The Courier after James McLintock’s Al Rahmah Welfare Organisation website indicated that RWO collaborated with it on a humanitarian project in Pakistan as recently as February.
Ex-Lawside Academy pupil James McLintock, who changed his name to Yaqoob Mansoor Al-Rashidi, is the president of the Al Rahmah Welfare Organisation (RWO) which the US Treasury has alleged is providing money for al Qaida, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Afghan extremist groups under the guise of helping orphans.
McLintock is on the department’s “specially designated global terrorist” list which freezes any property he has within US jurisdiction and bans Americans from doing business with him.
The US Treasury said McLintock received about $180,000 from donors in Britain between April 2011 and April 2012 and that he also received money from charities in the Persian Gulf and the UK.
Established in 2003, 1st Ethical works in partnership with the leading 200 mosques and Muslim faith schools nationwide on “money matters and social responsibility”.
McLintock posted on the Al Rahmah website in February 2016 that RWO “in partnership with 1st Ethical and other British donors” undertook a humanitarian project in Waziristan.
But Arslan Baz of Bolton-based 1st Ethical said neither RWO nor McLintock were currently supported by his organisation and “we have not donated to RWO in this timeframe”.
McLintock then said 1st Ethical’s involvement with the charity ended in 2011 and blamed “mistakes” on his “new website”.
He has also denied he was a jihadist, saying: “I have been doing charity work for the past 20 years.”
He also described comments made against him by North East Scotland Conservative candidate Alex Johnstone in Monday’s Courieras “despicable”.String of charities listed on websiteSeveral partner charities are listed on the RWO website run by James McLintock.
They include the International Islamic Charitable Organisation (IICO), the Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahayan Foundation in UAE, King Abdullah’s Relief Campaign for (the) Pakistani People, Welfare and
Development Organisation (WDO), World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and Qatar Charity.
RWO’s website also posted two letters from McLintock thanking King Abdullah’s Relief Campaign for the Pakistani People (KARCPP) for the aid it supposedly received and then distributed. But
McLintock has now said that neither KARCPP or the UAE president’s Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahayan Foundation are still involved with his charity.
All of the charities listed as “external relations” were contacted by The Courier but did not respond to requests to comment.Schoolboy who turned into ‘Taliban’As a boy growing up in Dundee, James McLintock was raised a Catholic and attended Lawside Academy.
But it was while studying at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s that he embarked on the path that would see him fighting against communist Russians in Afghanistan and Serbs in Bosnia.
But it was not until 2001 that the former Dundee schoolboy earned himself the nickname the ‘Tartan Taliban’.
He was arrested on Christmas Eve at a checkpoint near Afghanistan’s border and held until he had been interrogated by intelligence services.
Eventually McLintock was released when it was proved that he had been working for a charity.
However, Wikileaks documents released two years ago suggested that McLintock had links with al Qaida leader Ali Muhammad Abdul Aziz al-Fahkri.
The documents also suggested he had helped run terror training camps in Afghanistan.