WASHINGTON, 19 October — The United States will send an envoy to Europe in a bid to freeze the accounts of some Saudi bankers and businessmen who allegedly finance the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, the Washington Post said yesterday.
US intelligence has identified about a dozen of Al-Qaeda’s top financial backers, most of whom are "wealthy Saudis", senior administration officials told the paper.
Jimmy Gurule, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for enforcement, said he will begin a six-day visit to Europe tomorrow to present his counterparts with "specific information on selective, high-impact targets" so they can "be designated terrorist financiers and have their assets blocked.
More important than the number of individuals, "is the high impact these targets have," he said
Another senior official told the daily the people on the list have provided Al-Qaeda with tens of millions of dollars by routing the money through charities and businesses around the world. Gurule said the United States wants "the European Union to take action."
Senior US officials said they were able to identify the terrorist financiers from intelligence gathered from interviews with captured Al-Qaeda members.
The senior official said the list goes "to the check writers who give the money to Al-Qaeda, not just the facilitators and those who move the money around. We are finally getting to the source."
He said the effort to freeze their assets in Europe would be followed by an international consensus to demand that the Saudi government crack down on the alleged terror financiers.
The Saudi Embassy had no comment on the matter, the daily said.
The article coincides with a report released Thursday by the Council on Foreign Relations calling on the administration of US President George W. Bush to confront countries allegedly financing Al-Qaeda network.
