Investigators hunting for al Qaeda assets are finding that much of the group's money is in commodities rather than in banks, The Washington Postreported today.
Al Qaeda operatives began shifting money out of bank accounts and into gold and precious stones such as diamonds, tanzanite and sapphires long before the September 11th attacks, the Postreported, citing investigators and financial sources in Asia, Africa and the US.
The transfer of assets went largely unnoticed and left much of al Qaeda's financial network untouched by the US-led campaign to freeze terrorist funds around the globe, the newspaper said.
"It was a paradigm shift in the financial organization that we missed," a European financial investigator told the Post. "Everyone was trying to find bank accounts in Geneva when al Qaeda was greatly reducing their exposure in the formal financial sector. Now we are finding tentacles into all kinds of precious stones and metals."
Late in September, the Bush administration launched an international effort to choke off funding for Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, which the US said were behind the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington.
The newspaper quoted one source as saying that bin Laden's chief financial officers began a serious shift in assets from banks to commodities after the US froze $254 million in money from Afghanistan toppled Taliban government in 1998 following the attacks on two US embassies in East Africa by al Qaeda operatives.
In addition to the transfer of assets, efforts to track down al Qaeda funds have been hampered by inter-agency turf battles in the US government, the Postsaid, citing sources in various agencies.