Mohammed Alkhereiji • Arab News Staff

JEDDAH, 27 August 2003 — The Kingdom and the United States will this week launch a joint task force in an effort to investigate terrorist funding, David Aufhauser, the US Treasury Department’s general counsel, announced on Monday.

The Kingdom and Pakistan have also agreed to share intelligence to tackle terrorism, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali said yesterday.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan will devise joint strategies against terrorism, Jamali told reporters in Islamabad, but did not elaborate.

The Saudi-American task force will operate out of Riyadh and is described by Aufhauser as “renewed fervor on the part of the Saudis to get to the bottom of terrorism within their own peninsula.”

Aufhauser, who visited Jeddah two weeks ago with officials from the US National Security Council and the FBI, said the Saudi-led Joint Task Force on Terrorist Financing would use asset freezing and trade penalties along with traditional criminal actions. One of the first tasks of the Saudi-led task force will be to comb through documents Saudi officials seized in the aftermath of the May 12 coordinated suicide bombings in Riyadh that killed 34 people, he said. Aufhauser also said that Saudi Arabia would also like to get to the bottom of the “9/11 report” but would not go into details.

Referring to a US congressional report which came out last month and implied Saudi links to the hijacked airplane attacks that struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Treasury official said while he could not address the contents of the report — parts of which have been classified — the allegations of Saudi financial ties to the attacks in media reports created a desire in Saudi Arabia to prove the country was not a state sponsor of terrorism. Saudi officials have asked for the classified portions of the report to be made public.

Aufhauser said during his trip to Jeddah that Saudi authorities also reviewed for visiting US officials changes they had made in the way charitable money flows in the country. “One example is that they have now barred the collection of cash in mosques. That’s pretty dramatic. Can you imagine a law in the United States barring the collection of cash in churches and temples?” Aufhauser said.

The task force will include agents from the US Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury’s Criminal Investigation Division and the FBI along with officers from the Saudi police and the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency.