A man has been granted asylum in New Zealand for allegedly unknowingly providing money to terrorists during the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka, according to foreign reports.
The move comes after the country’s immigration and security tribunal confirmed that the man had not provided financial support to support terrorism and had acted as a money-transfer courier who did not know who received the money or where it came from.
It shows that he has made several transactions per month in a money transfer scheme involving his mother-in-law and a foreign broker.
His Tamil wife has been arrested following the Easter bombing in Sri Lanka in 2019. Later, she was released and the couple went into hiding and later flew to New Zealand on fake passports. According to reports, they were granted asylum in June on an appeal.
The tribunal ruled that their testimony was ‘reliable, consistent and powerful’.
The report further states that both the wife and the husband are afraid of being harmed by the Sri Lankan authorities as the husband is involved in a money transfer system that the authorities trust in connection with the persons involved in the Easter 2019 terrorist attack.
It said the man’s ignorance of the money exchanging business he was involved in was the ‘fundamental’ reason. He was not a broker, but a courier who took money from brokers in Colombo and deposited it in banks, and he was involved with the account details given to him by a foreign broker through his mother-in-law.
He told the court that it was a side business that lasted for nearly a year but the authorities saw him as a traitor.
The husband is a Sinhalese and the foreign broker is a Sri Lankan Muslim. The wife’s sister is married to a Muslim.
The woman’s husband thinks some of the accounts in which he deposited the money may have been linked to people involved in the attacks.
However, the report further states that he has no idea about this and does not know if he has any connection with anyone involved in the attack.
