Spanish police have detained a 38-year-old Chinese national who owned a hair salon near Barcelona on suspicion of financing the militant group Hamas through about 600,000 euros in cryptocurrency transfers, regional police said on Friday, according to Reuters.
Investigators traced at least 31 crypto transactions from virtual wallets controlled by the suspect to addresses that are suspected of being linked to an entity used by the terrorist group.
Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by the 27-member European Union and other Western nations.
Police declined to comment on the suspect’s possible motives and on whether he had interacted knowingly with Hamas or was just an intermediary, citing the sensitivity of the investigation.
During searches of the suspect’s hair salon and home, officers seized cryptoassets, cash, some 9,000 cigars, jewelry, computers and mobile phones, the police said.
They also froze several bank accounts, with the total value of seized and blocked assets exceeding 370,000 euros.
The investigation began last June during a separate probe into fraud and money laundering, police said.
Authorities have warned in recent years that terrorist groups such as Hamas are using cryptocurrencies to move funds across borders.
In November, victims of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel filed suit against crypto giant Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao, accusing them of enabling millions of dollars in payments to Hamas and other US-designated terrorist groups.
In 2021, then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz signed an order for the seizure of cryptocurrencies in the amount of 2.6 million shekels from the al-Mathaddon exchange company which was linked to Hamas in Gaza.
Several months later, Gantz signed a similar a seizure order for cryptocurrency amounting to tens of thousands of shekels from 12 digital accounts.
(Arutz Sheva-Israel National News’ North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)
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