Gem Tied to Terror Loses Sparkle

The young miners here are known as wanapollo, Swahili for spacemen. Several times a day, they emerge from half a mile below the earth, their dark bodies coated in glittering graphite dust.

They are in search of tanzanite, a gem found in a 5-square-mile patch of scrub near the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

A few months ago, Mohammed Abubakar supported his mother and eight siblings with money earned from mining the blue-violet stone. But since Sept. 11, reports that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network controlled a chunk of the tanzanite trade have sent the price of the gemstone plunging by about 70%, slashing his earnings.

U.S. retailers Tiffany & Co. and Zale Corp. and the QVC television shopping channel, which together sold about 80% of the tanzanite, have suspended sales, saying they didn’t want to be associated with Bin Laden--if allegations regarding his links to the stone are true.

In recent years, tanzanite has become one of the most popular colored gemstones in the U.S., thanks to jewelers who tout it as less expensive and bluer than sapphire.

“Soon, these stones are going to be as valuable as concrete,” Abubakar grumbled to a reporter recently.

Abubakar’s economic pain demonstrates how the U.S. war on terrorism is being felt across the globe--from travelers at international airports to poor miners in Tanzania’s hinterlands.

Mererani has become a town filled with recrimination and questions: Did an influential Muslim cleric encourage believers to sell stones to people allegedly linked to Bin Laden? What role, if any, did a wealthy tanzanite dealer play in helping to fund Al Qaeda? And most important, can tanzanite survive the taint of Bin Laden?

Tanzanite’s links to Bin Laden were suspected long before Sept. 11, but no one seemed to care. During last year’s trial of four men accused of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a prosecution witness testified that Al Qaeda operatives fattened the terror network’s coffers by trading in commodities including animal hides, sugar and tanzanite.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Tanzanite was the code name for Bin Laden’s personal secretary, Wadih El-Hage, who was convicted by a New York federal jury for his role in running Bin Laden’s businesses during the mid-1990s.

From Nairobi, El-Hage operated a company known as Tanzanite King. El-Hage’s diary, which FBI agents seized in 1997, detailed how he traveled to London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, marketing the gem to jewelry stores, according to federal sources.

Another key player, according to miners, brokers and industry officials, was Sheikh Omar Suleyman. They said that as head of the Taqwa mosque here he encouraged believers to sell their tanzanite to Bin Laden loyalists, who smuggled the gemstones to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Suleyman denied the allegation.

Tanzanian authorities worry that reports about Bin Laden’s involvement with tanzanite could destroy the livelihood of tens of thousands of mining families.

As the U.S. market for tanzanite is drying up, Mererani, which once resembled a California gold rush town, is slowly becoming a ghost town. Bars have gone quiet. Many people who came here dreaming of expensive cars and luxurious homes are returning to their villages empty-handed.

“It’s all because of this Bin Laden,” Abubakar said. “That man should be caught and killed straight away.”

‘It Doesn’t Pay to Make the Americans Angry’

Salome Chami, who runs a boarding house, complained that several tenants recently had skipped out without paying. “It doesn’t pay to make the Americans angry at you,” she said. “People know that if Americans [aren’t] buying tanzanite, there’s no reason to stay in Mererani.”

Tanzanian officials say they would need to conduct an exhaustive investigation to determine Al Qaeda’s interest in the gem.

Patrick Rutabanzibwa, permanent secretary in Tanzania’s Ministry of Mines, said the government could account for only about 5% of the nearly $400 million in tanzanite exported last year.

“We can’t say that no, no, no, Al Qaeda has no interest in tanzanite,” Rutabanzibwa said from his office in Dar es Salaam. “What we can say is that there is a lot of smuggling of tanzanite, which really means the government doesn’t know how it gets out of the country, let alone who is actually involved in it. The wealth that they get out of that trade is something we can only speculate about.”

Abubakar and other miners say they long for the period preceding Sept. 11, when all that people in Mererani cared about was making money, providing for their families and having a good time.

Tanzanite transformed Mererani into a major job center. An estimated 30,000 people from across Tanzania relocated here. As more of the brown ore--it turns blue after being heated--was brought to the surface, mud huts were replaced by brick houses sporting satellite dishes. Toyota Land Cruiser taxis ferried workers from Kilimanjaro International Airport to the mines. Bars and brothels with “New York” and “Hollywood” in their names appeared overnight.

Abubakar heard about it in his small village outside Arusha, about 80 miles away. He made the two-hour trip and worked out a deal with a mine owner: He would toil for food, a place to sleep in the shacks on the mine premises and a small commission.

To blast a mining tunnel, Abubakar and co-workers, some of whom look no older than 13, stick dynamite in an air pocket, then scamper up a ladder cobbled together from scrap lumber to escape the blast.

The air in the mine after the blast can top 120 degrees and can be lethal. The young miners have little or no safety equipment--no goggles, no masks, not even headlamps, although cheap flashlights are strapped to their bare heads or, sometimes, helmets with strips of black inner-tube rubber.

Blasting is the easy part. The young miners must climb ladders with plastic sacks containing rubble from the bottom of the mines. Occasionally, an exhausted miner drops his 50-pound sack on comrades below.

Miners Were Able to Support Entire Families

Before Sept. 11, Abubakar earned up to $100 a month. That was enough to support his entire family and to pay for his numerous sprees at the brothels. He earned extra money by selling small tanzanite pieces to red-robed Masai tribesmen, many of whom abandoned their cattle-raising during the tanzanite rush to become gem brokers.

Masai brokers traveled to Arusha, where they sold the stones to jewelers who export them mainly to Jaipur, India; Bangkok, Thailand; and New York.

From there, the gems ended up in places like the Kristalle jewelry store in Laguna Beach, where owner Wayne Leicht recently sold a large uncut tanzanite for $50,000.

For Mererani, the biggest blow came when Tiffany, the gem’s main retailer, stopped selling tanzanite at its 126 stores worldwide. The company, said spokeswoman Linda Buckley, bought tanzanite from established U.S. sources but “it’s very difficult to track the origin of a stone as it travels from rough to cut and polished.”

Tiffany “has no reason to believe that the tanzanite we purchased in any way . . . benefited the Al Qaeda network,” she said. “But we felt that until we have more information, it’s best to suspend sales.”

Suleyman, the head of the local mosque, denied in an interview that the mosque was used in Bin Laden’s tanzanite trade. “The Koran teaches that we can’t use the mosque for these purposes,” he said. “It would be a big sin to do so.” He also denied that his mosque, now under construction, was being bankrolled by Abdulhakim Mulla, arguably the region’s largest tanzanite dealer.

Gem Broker Denies Connection to Bin Laden

Competitors say Suleyman instructed his followers to sell their gemstones exclusively to Mulla, who sent them to Dubai, where Al Qaeda operatives resold them.

Mulla, the 43-year-old son of Iranian immigrants, said he plowed profits from his tanzanite business into many other business ventures. He recently bought the Tanzania Wildlife Corp. from the government. For about $2,000 a day, the company permits sport hunters to kill zebras, wildebeest and other wild animals in Tanzania’s game reserves.

Mulla also denied any connection to Bin Laden in a recent interview. “Some jealous people want to destroy me,” he said. “I don’t know a thing about Al Qaeda.”

He opened one of the large steel vaults in his office and scooped up two handfuls of glittering tanzanite. “If people hear that these stones are helping to kill innocent people, no one is going to buy them,” he said. “My business will be finished.”

A Tanzanian delegation headed by Minister of Mines Edgar Maokola Majogo traveled to a gemstone show in Tucson, Ariz., last month to proclaim that there were no known links between tanzanite and terrorism, and that the government would take steps to ensure that the gemstone doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. For the miners of Mererani, the promises are too late.

Times staff writers Steve Braun in Washington and Hector Becerra in Los Angeles contributed to this report.