LONDON, Aug 11: The Bank of England on Friday froze the accounts of 19 of the 24 people arrested in an alleged plot to blow up US-bound planes, with experts hoping to establish an international money trail that can help unravel the case.
Britain’s central bank made the names public following Thursday’s pre-dawn raids across Britain, which it hopes can also help prevent other attacks.
“There will obviously be investigations going on around these people’s bank records,” a spokesman from Britain’s finance minstry, the Treasury, said.
“It’s all about making sure that no one else who may have access to these accounts can move the money out of the country, can maybe ship the money into a terrorist bank account, can even just withdraw the money and use it for nefarious purposes.”
Analysts believe establishing a money trail is vital in the light of British media reports that a major financial transfer from Pakistan — reportedly intended to buy several airline tickets — was the trigger for the raids.
“Money is a hard intelligence matter. It moves, you follow it,” former British government intelligence analyst Crispin Black said.
But government investigators may be hindered by the fact that some of the suspects may not use Western banks to store their money, opting instead for Islamic bank accounts, or holding their money in cash instead, Mr Black said.
Any potential cash transfers from Pakistan would then have to travel through the global ‘hawala’ system, an informal currency transfer system.
Essentially, this involves an individual approaching a hawala broker in one city and giving him a sum of money to be wired to a recipient in another city.
In the hawala system, there are no paper trails, confounding international investigators hoping to crack terror plots.
The Treasury spokesman admitted that it was a ‘possibility’ that potential security suspects may use the hawala system.
“We try and freeze... any of the money that these people would have access to,” he said.
“There is a lot of work going on as to how we can track money that is channelled through those systems.”—AFP
