Biography
Yassin Aref is a Kurdish Iraqi imam who came to the United States as a UN refugee in 1999. He was the imam of Masjid As-Salam in Albany, New York at the time of his arrest on August 5, 2004 in an FBI sting operation. The FBI informant Shahed Hussein, posing as an arms dealer, asked pizzeria owner Mohammed Mosharref Hossain to launder money allegedly from the sale of a surface-to-air missile to Jaish-e-Mohammed; Aref was brought in solely as a religious witness to the loan transaction, in accordance with Islamic law on financial agreements.
He was convicted in October 2006 of conspiracy and money-laundering charges and sentenced in March 2007 to 15 years in federal prison. The 2023 ruling by U.S. District Judge Thomas McAvoy that the FBI informant Shahed Hussein had been a villain whose testimony in unrelated cases warranted relief came too late for Aref, who had already completed his sentence. He was deported to the Iraqi Kurdistan Region after release.
