Posted on 06/23/2002 6:07:20 AM PDT by Ranger
Indian intelligence and financial investigators have investigated alleged links of some jewellers and diamond merchants in the country with an international diamond network which has been laundering funds for Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda, official sources said on Sunday.
Refusing to disclose the nature of operations or against whom investigations had been carried out, the sources said the international transactions of these jewellers and diamond merchants, including those based in Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur and Surat, had been closely monitored.
The officials said the probe had been initiated following reports that Indian diamond-polishing companies had received "above-normal orders" late last year and at the beginning of this year.
Diamond trading had sharply increased after the September 11 terror attacks and the freezing of funds of the terrorist outfit the world over, the sources said adding that while over 110 million dollars worth of Al-Qaeda assets had been blocked worldwide, the outfit's assets are estimated to be worth over five billion dollars.
They said the diamond orders were allegedly placed by those individuals or groups having links with the Al-Qaeda diamond network.
Stating that diamond trading held special advantages over ordinary money laundering, the sources said diamonds could be "easily hidden, they did not lose their value and are hard to track."
"Tracking illegal diamond sales is very complicated and links are very hard to establish," they said.
Meanwhile, a United Nations monitoring group, which was set up after the 9/11 attacks, has produced a report stating that the Al-Qaeda terror network might have been transferring its financial assets into gold and diamonds and using the internet to circumvent an international freeze on its funds.
The UN is "concerned about the use of internet by Al-Qaeda and many of its associates, not only regarding financial transactions, but also in support of their communications, command, control and logistics", a report said.
Experts were looking into ways and means to "disrupt and neutralise" these criminal actions through the internet, the report said but did not give any estimate of the amount of funds that may have been converted into gold and diamonds
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