Hasan Čengić

Who is Hasan Čengić?

Hasan Čengić is the former Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Čengić was born in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina. A Muslim cleric, he was convicted together with the future president Alija Izetbegović by the communist regime of Yugoslavia in 1983 and served five years of a ten-year sentence.

He is a member of a powerful clan headed by his father, Halid Čengić, the main logistics expert in the Bosnian army and a senior official, with his sons, in Bosnia's Agencija za Informacije I Dokumentaciju intelligence agency. Hasan Čengić has travelled frequently to Tehran since 1983 and has been deeply involved in Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia. During the Bosnian War, he lived in Tehran and Istanbul. According to Austrian police, Čengić was on the supervisory board of the Third World Relief Agency, a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization connected to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network. Čengić's involvement was confirmed by the TWRA's director, Elfatih Hassanein.

Well informed sources in Sarajevo claim that only Hasan addressed Izetbegović with 'ti' while all the others addressed him as 'Mr. President,' a sign of his extraordinary degree of intimacy with the president.