U.S.-Saudi task force to target terror financing

Saudi Arabia and the United States have for the first time agreed to set up a joint task force that will station U.S. law enforcement officials in the kingdom to target individuals suspected of funnelling millions of dollars to Al Qaida and other terrorist organisations, officials from both countries said yesterday.

Senior officials of the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service will be flying to Riyadh to iron out operational details of the group, which will focus on mining information from bank accounts, computer records and other financial data to track and shut down the money flow, according to senior officials from both governments.

U.S. officials said the creation of the task force is an important step whose effectiveness will depend on how seriously the governments take the issue.

"I don't think there is a more immediate way to test the joint resolve of our countries than to have a joint investigative unit, with the linguistic and computer resources of both our countries, that is capable of focusing on specific targets, rather than talking in generalities," said David Aufhauser, the Treasury Department's counsel general, who helped negotiate the agreement.

"We now have a testable proposition of people's resolve."

Dennis Lormel, head of the FBI division investigating terrorist financing, said, "It was agreed to at a very senior level, so we hope this specifically focused group will work."

Relations between the two countries have been strained in recent months over allegations in a congressional report and elsewhere that wealthy Saudis have financed terror groups and that Riyadh has not moved aggressively to stem that flow of money.

Intelligence experts say that funding from wealthy individuals on the Arabian Peninsula to Al Qaida still amounts to millions of dollars a year.

Independent terrorist analysts were cautiously optimistic about the agreement.

"We are on a learning curve in terms of tracking the money," said one Saudi official. "What we are proposing is a full exchange of information, where we can get real-time information that can lead to a greater understanding of how terrorist financing works by both countries."