Former Exec: U.S. Company Funded Terrorists

April 16, 2004 -- Before his company sent him overseas, Allan Laird, a former Denver-based mining executive, had never heard of Abu Sayyaf.

As Laird quickly learned when he arrived in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf is one of the world's most-feared terrorist organizations, closely connected to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Laird said he also soon discovered the company for whom he formerly worked, Echo Bay, was regularly paying Abu Sayyaf and other terror groups in the Philippines in exchange for protection of its gold-mining operations. Laird calls the practice "corporate support of terrorism."

Laird took his story to the Sierra Club, the conservation group known for its opposition to the mining industry. Marilyn Berlin Snell, a reporter for the club's bimonthly magazine Sierra, is reporting Laird's story this week.

Thursday, in a moral victory for Laird, the Department of Justice reversed course and reactivated the investigation into Echo Bay's business practices.

"My company was dealing directly with terrorists. It must have been close to $2 million [U.S. dollars]. Maybe more," Laird said.

Laird said he believes that the funding provided by his former company cost American lives. That funding, he says, continued until the company closed its mining operations in 1997.

In May of 2001, Gracia and Martin Burnham, missionaries from Wichita, Kan., were celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary trip at Dos Palmas Resort off Palawan Island in the Philippines when they were kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf and taken to the jungles of Basilan Island.

"My goal is to go home alive to my children," Martin Burnham said while in captivity on a videotape recorded by a reporter for a television station in the Philippines, who was given permission to visit the hostages.

He never did. After 376 days of captivity, Martin was killed in a firefight when the Filipino Army made a rescue attempt.