Feds: Man hid terror cash. (Hat tip: Ethel Carol.)

DEARBORN — Federal agents found thousands of dollars and evidence of wire transfers when they searched the house of an illegal immigrant charged with providing material support to terrorists.

Mahmoud Kourani was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on a charge of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization: Hezbollah.

The U.S. government considers Hezbollah, a Lebanese group known as Party of God or Islamic Jihad, to be a terrorist organization. The group’s goals, the government says, include the eradication of “Western imperialism” from the Middle East.

Hezbollah has conducted numerous high profile terrorist attacks, including the murder of a Marine Corps lieutenant in 1989.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Kourani bribed a Mexican consular official in Beirut to get a visa to travel to Mexico. Kourani and a traveling companion then paid another man in Mexico to be smuggled across the southern U.S. border on Feb. 4, 2001, the government said.

Kourani, 32, was “a member, fighter, recruiter and fund-raiser for Hezbollah,” the government said. His brother, an unindicted co-conspirator, is Hezbollah’s chief of military security in southern Lebanon and oversaw Kourani’s activities.

This is the first direct evidence I’ve seen that Hizb’Allah is taking advantage of our porous border with Mexico to infiltrate the US.