New York, NY —

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau unsealed a sweeping indictment of a fugitive Chinese businessman, who he says is illegally funneling money through New York City banks, to sell materials to Iran for making nuclear weapons.

MORGENTHAU: Seventy percent of the world's business is done in dollars, so it's a traditional way of doing business, to do it in dollars, and to do that you gotta go through U.S. banks and if you're going to go through U.S. banks you're going to go through banks in Manhattan.

Morgenthau says his office will ask the Chinese government to extradite Li Feng Wei so he can be prosecuted locally. He says one goal of the investigation was to make the public and the federal government aware that Iran is "deadly serious" about developing nuclear weapons technology.