Mojahedin in Financial Crisis

The Bush administration will announce on Monday the creation of a high-level office to strengthen its effort to stop money from flowing to terrorists, a senior administration official said.

The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence will be housed at the Treasury Department. It merges three sections and will include a new undersecretary at the Treasury. Currently, the Treasury has an undersecretary for domestic finance and international affairs.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, 351 individuals and groups have been singled out for financially supporting terrorists. Approximately $200 million in terrorist-related assets have been frozen or seized, according to Treasury data.

Terrorist organization the Mojahedin is one of the groups whose activities were banned and its accounts were frozen in August 2003. The US State Department banned the MKO and NCRI and its representatives' activities in the US, and the US Treasury froze the group's properties.

When the Mojahedin held a concert in Washington in January this year, under the pretext of helping Bam survivors, the properties of the concert organizer were seized by the FBI.

On March 3, the US Treasury emphasized blocking the accounts of this group worldwide.

Terrorists have used a variety of means to store, transfer and make money, such as buying and selling commodities, weapons and diamonds and setting up charitable organizations as fronts for terrorism financing, the GAO said.

According to reports, most of propaganda efforts of this group, which were usually performed through bribing, have been disrupted. For example, their satellite programmes were stopped due to electricity shortages in Ashraf Camp in Iraq.