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Home / New Zealand

Director 'horrified' ISIS website registered to company

Patrice Dougan
By Patrice Dougan
Assistant Chief of Staff·APNZ·
13 Oct, 2014 11:10 PM4 mins to read

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The director of Private Box, right, says he was 'horrified' to discover his company's address had been used to register a suspected Islamic State website.

The director of Private Box, right, says he was 'horrified' to discover his company's address had been used to register a suspected Islamic State website.

The managing director of a New Zealand company says he was horrified to discover a suspected Islamic State website had been registered to his company.

The website, which was shut down by Iceland authorities, was registered to Private Box, a mail forwarding company in Auckland.

Gareth Foster, managing director of Private Box, said the website domain was registered to Suite 4551, 17b Farnham Street, Parnell and to Azym Abdullah.

Mr Foster said the person was not a customer of Private Box, however the company does provide a mail drop service to that address.

"We will be working with authorities to identify what relationship this account has with the person/website in question (if any). We will be fully co-operative any enquiry from the appropriate government officials."

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Mr Foster said Private Box was a reporting entity under the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter Funding of Terrorism Act.

"We have identified that certain jurisdictions and account types (mainly business) customers are high risk - and as such, perform identity verification and watch list check on this group.

"We also introduced additional measures as of March this year (as a result of an AML audit) for checking on accounts for potentially high risk personal use as well."

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Anwar Ghani, president of the Federation of Islamic Associations in New Zealand (Fianz), said he did not know Azym Abdullah and that he "certainly has no links with Fianz".

"(The Parnell address) is not used by anyone associated with Fianz either as a worker, council member, executive member or adviser," Dr Ghani said.

Iceland closed down the terrorist website believed to be used by jihadist organisation Islamic State, according to the authority responsible for the country's internet domain name '.is', Agence France-Presse reported.

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The site "khilafah.is" - which internet in Iceland Inc (ISNIC) said was run by a group calling itself Islamic State - was traced back to a web hosting company in Iceland at the weekend.

It was believed to have been online since mid-September.

ISNIC said it had "suspended domains that were used for the website of a known terrorist organisation".

Several other websites with similar names which IS militants claim to have established in parts of Iraq and Syria already exist in other countries and without clear links to the group, AFP said.

ISNIC head Jens Petur Jensen told local media in Iceland it was the first time the country had to close a website down because of its content.

"We have no experience with this... we have always pointed out that it's none of our business. That the Islamic State had their domain under '.is' was something we feared because of the abbreviation," he said.

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Mr Jensen said that the owners of the site did not reply to emails or to phone calls to a British number used for registration.

A spokeswoman for Prime Minister John Key said the matter was not among his responsibilities as Minister for National Security and Intelligence, and directed queries to Chris Finlayson, Minister for the Security Intelligence Services (SIS) and the Government Security Communications Bureau (GCSB).

A spokesman for Communications Minister Amy Adams said the issue did not fall under her portfolio.

Comment was being sought from Mr Finlayson's office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

More than 60 companies are registered at the Farnham St address, which supplies private boxes for companies to have a 'virtual office' for their post to be directed to.

According to the Companies Office 63 businesses have their registered addresses at the site.

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A number of them have since been struck off.

Meanwhile, Mr Jensen told Icelandic newspaper Visir: "The domain was registered on September 14 and the man listed [as the owner of] the site claims to be resident in New Zealand.

"The position is that we have a domain name that is registered under '.is', according to the registration details the owner lives in New Zealand, and the servers that host the domain are located in Hamburg in Germany."

A spokesman for New Zealand intelligence said: "We are aware of the story, but would not comment on what may or may not be operational matters."

- additional reporting Sophie Ryan, Lincoln Tan, AFP staff

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