WASHINGTON, 3 June 2004 — In a bid to crack down on financing of terrorist groups, Saudi Arabia announced yesterday it was dissolving a charity and creating a commission to manage private charitable work abroad.
Adel Al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah, said the Al-Haramain Charitable Foundation and other private groups would be dissolved or have their international operations and assets folded into the new Saudi National Commission for Charitable Work Abroad.
The US Treasury Department announced simultaneously that five additional branches of Al-Haramain, which has been the target of sanctions in the past, would be placed on a terrorism blacklist because of “financial, material and logistical support they provided to the Al-Qaeda network and other terrorist organizations.”
The five Al-Haramain branches are located in Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and the Netherlands.
In January, the United States and Saudi Arabia announced they had taken action against the charity’s branches in Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan and Tanzania.
The Saudi government ordered Al-Haramain to close all of its overseas branches in 2003 but subsequent monitoring has shown several are still in operation.
“We are working to identify and shut down the financial sources that support terrorism,” Al-Jubeir told a press conference at the Saudi Embassy here.
“We have audited our charities and reorganized charitable work abroad to ensure that funds reach their intended recipients,” he said.
Al-Jubeir said the new commission “will be subject to strict financial legal oversight, and will operate according to clear policies to ensure that charitable funds intended to help the needy are not misused.”
Yesterday’s announcement follows a deadly weekend attack attributed to Al-Qaeda terrorists in which 22 people were killed in the city of Alkhobar in the Eastern Province.
