WASHINGTON — A mosque established and funded by basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon gave more than $80,000 to charities the government later determined to be fronts for the terror groups al-Qaida and Hamas, according to financial records obtained by The Associated Press.

Olajuwon told the AP he had not known of any links to terrorism when the donations were made, prior to the government's crackdown on the groups, and would not have given the money if he had known.

"There is no way you can go back in time," Olajuwon said in a telephone interview from Jordan, where he is studying Arabic. "After the fact, now they have the list of organizations that are banned by the government."

A Treasury Department spokeswoman, Molly Millerwise, declined to discuss Olajuwon's contributions but said, "In many cases donors are being unwittingly misled by the charities."

Federal law enforcement officials said they were not investigating Olajuwon, a 7-foot center born in Nigeria who played 17 seasons for the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association before retiring in 2002.

Olajuwon, 42, who became a U.S. citizen in 1993, was known as "The Dream" and won the NBA's Most Valuable Player award in 1994, when he led the Rockets to the first of back-to-back championships.

The Olajuwon-founded Islamic Da'Wah Center in Houston gave more than $60,000 in 2000 and $20,000 in 2002 to the Islamic African Relief Agency, the center's tax records show.

The government shut down the relief agency in October, saying it gave money and other support to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

But the agency and its possible ties to terrorism had been in news stories years earlier, before Olajuwon's contributions:

• The U.S. Agency for International Development cut off two government grants to the Islamic African Relief Agency in 1999, saying funding the group "would not be in the national interest of the United States."

• A former fund-raiser for the relief agency, Ziyad Khaleel, was named in a federal trial in 2001 as the man who bought a satellite telephone that bin Laden used to plan the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

• Numerous news organizations reported shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks that the relief agency was among more than two dozen Islamic charities under scrutiny for possible terrorist ties.

Olajuwon also participated in a 1999 celebrity bowling tournament for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which the U.S. government shut down in 2001, accusing it of sending money to Hamas. The Islamic Da'Wah Center gave more than $2,000 to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation in 2000, according to its tax returns.