IRAQ - Oct 4 - Al-Qaeda 'Financier' Arrested In Iraq.

The US military claims that American and Iraqi forces had arrested an alleged financier for al-Qaeda who had received $100m from donors outside Iraq to fund insurgent operations. Military officials have long attributed al-Qaeda's expansion in Iraq to its access to external finance, but rarely release figures that give insight into the scale of the operation that they say that they are facing. The $100m (71m, [pounds sterling]50m) sum - far greater than amounts usually associated with Sunni insurgents - had been received over the summer from "terrorist supporters who cross the Iraq border illegally or fly into Iraq from Italy, Syria and Egypt", according to a statement. It did not indicate how the total was arrived at or whether the money had been recovered in Oct 2 raid near Baghdad which saw the unnamed man arrested. But US officers have previously said that captured insurgents will boast about attacks and exaggerate their importance. The statement said that the man had distributed $50,000 a month - a figure more in line with past reports of al-Qaeda's financial activities - and employed 40-50 "extremists" to plant improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs, and paid them $3,000 for each operation. It also said that he was linked to the purchase of explosives used in the attack on the Golden Shrine at Samarra - a holy Shi'ite site - which escalated the country's sectarian violence in February 2006. No details of the man's nationality were released but, according to the statement, the financier used a leather merchant business as a front to smuggle in weapons and explosives, and had shops in the Iraqi town of Falluja, in Syria and in Jordan. Little precise information has been made public about the Iraqi al-Qaeda network's sources of funding, but Iraqi politicians claim that it draws from donors in Gulf countries and the hundreds of millions smuggled abroad by the former regime just prior to the March 2003 US-led invasion. ? A member of Iraq's parliament is in US custody and being questioned after an Iraqi special forces raid on a suspected al-Qaeda meeting, the US military said.