Interpol: Cocaine Trafficking Used to Finance Hizbullah
The head of Interpol said Wednesday that cocaine trafficking is used to finance both the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and Hizbullah.
"Recently, authorities have dismantled cocaine-trafficking rings that used their proceeds to finance the activities of the FARC and Hizbullah," Ronald Noble, told the opening of the Americas Interpol conference in Chile.
He urged governments to do more checking on lost and stolen passports, warning they could be used to smuggle terrorists into countries in the Americas.
Noble said too few passports are reported as lost or stolen — and too few are checked against international databases of missing documents when travelers cross borders.
He said that Central American countries "have become the main transit point for Iraqis being smuggled into the United States," with Interpol tracking 74 cases of Iraqis traveling with fraudulent passports from various European countries. Only 24 of those documents had been reported to Interpol as lost or stolen.
Noble said that only one of every three of travelers entering American nations in 2008 had their passports checked against Interpol”s database of stolen or lost travel documents.