PEORIA, Illinois, 31 May 2003 — A Qatari native who is alleged to have run a credit card scam to help fund the Al-Qaeda terror network denied misleading FBI agents in federal court here Thursday and was ordered held without bond.

Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri pleaded not guilty to making false statements to FBI agents and five other counts relating to identity and credit card fraud and making false statements to banks during a brief hearing in US district court in Peoria.

He will remain in custody pending his July 21 trial. The 38-year-old was arrested in December 2001 after being repeatedly quizzed by FBI agents investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

According to the indictment, Al-Marri lied to FBI agents when he said that he did not call a phone number used by Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi, the alleged moneyman behind the Sept. 11 hijackings, several times in the fall of 2001.

Prosecutors claim that Al-Marri also lied to the agents about when he was last in the United States. In interviews with the authorities, Al-Marri said that he had been outside the US for some 10 years, since he graduated from Peoria’s Bradley University with a business degree in 1991.

But authorities claim Al-Marri was in the United States in the summer of 2000, when he allegedly used fake names and social security numbers to open three bank accounts in Macomb, central Illinois and set up a dummy postal address for a ghost business “AAA Carpets.”

For his part, Al-Marri said he returned to the United States on Sept. 10 — one day before the attacks on New York and Washington — to study for a masters degree in computer science at Bradley.

Meanwhile, according to a survey released on Thursday, the US war on terror since the Sept. 11 attacks is making the world less hospitable to refugees and displaced people whose ranks swelled by 4.3 million people last year. The survey, published by the US Committee for Refugees, found that due to the counterterrorism campaign and aggressive screening of foreigners, the US admitted only 27,000 displaced people last year, less than half the number of those admitted in 2001 and the fewest in more than 30 years.