DINAH LORD: UK: "Somali Taliban" behind stoning gets UK funding.

We've talked in the past about the high ranking Somali officials living part time on the dole in the UK and spending the rest of their time in Somalia getting busy with war crimes and such.

But now we have this revelation:

Sums thought to be totalling tens of thousands of pounds a week are being sent to the Shabaab militia, a fundamentalist Islamic group blamed for sentencing a 13-year-old girl to be stoned to death in the southern city of Kismayo.

The execution, details of which were revealed last week by Amnesty International, was imposed on the girl, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, after she complained to a Shabaab-run Sharia court that she had been gang-raped.

I know you've heard about the stoning death of Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, but the details of her punishment are truly horrific:

"Don't kill me"... "four men forced her into the hole and buried her up to her neck. Fifty men then set about stoning her to death. After 10 minutes she was dug up and two nurses checked to see if she was alive. She was. So they put her back in the ground and the stoning recommenced."

"People in Kismayo say they live in constant fear of the Al-Shabab, but not everyone was content to watch a "clearly distressed" girl being stoned to death. Some people tried to intervene. The gunmen fired shots; one man was wounded and an eight-year-old boy was shot dead. The militia later apologised for his killing."

Follow the money:

A London-based Somali community leader has claimed that much of their funding is coming from the Somali diaspora in Britain, many of whom support the groups' fierce guerrilla war against Somalia's long-time enemy Ethiopia, which invaded in January 2007.

"People are sending money over to back the Shabaab because they want to see the Ethiopians kicked out, even if they don't have much sympathy with the Islamist agenda," said Mohamed Abdullahi, director of the UK Somali Community Initiative. "But over here in Britain, they are not seeing the violence that they are fuelling, or realising that al-Shabaab has some very hardline policies. Many people here were shocked to hear about the stoning incident, and said that it was not Islamic. In that case, they should think twice about sending money."

How about the UK thinking twice about allowing the hawala monetary system to continue to flourish? There's an idea...

Mr Abdullahi said that most of the money being channeled to the Shabaab came via the traditional hawala money transfer system, an informal wire service arrangement which is hard for the authorities to monitor. Post-September 11, hawala agents in Britain agreed to abide by money laundering rules, but in practice there is little real restriction on which inviduals they send money to in Somalia.

And this is the end result: