A senior al-Qaeda operative who hid out in the city of Niigata for more than a year may have been laundering money while in Japan, police sources said Thursday.
Lionel Dumont, 33, a French national of Algerian descent, allegedly opened a postal savings account about a month after he entered Japan in July 2002 with a forged passport.
According to the sources, the account maintained a balance of around 10 million yen, but it contained just several thousand yen when Dumont finally left Japan last September. Remittances of about 6 million yen each were often posted in the account to and from four or five other Muslim foreign nationals in Japan.