WASHINGTON, Feb 17: The Pakistani link with Taliban\Al Qaeda operations continues to be highlighted in one form or another in the American media.

On Sunday, The Washington Post carried a report claiming how, just as the United States and its allies swept toward Afghanistan’s main cities last autumn, the Taliban and Al Qaeda network “sent waves of couriers with bars of gold and bundles of dollars across the porous border into Pakistan,” with their transactions centred in Dubai, the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates.

In small shops and businesses along the border, the money and gold, taken from Afghanistan’s banks and national coffers, were collected and moved by trusted Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives to Karachi, according to the paper.

Then, using couriers and the virtually untraceable “hawala” money transfer system, they transferred millions of dollars to Dubai, where the assets were converted into gold bullion. “The riches of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were subsequently scattered around the world — including some that went to the United States — through a financial structure that has been little affected by the international efforts to seize suspected terrorist assets,” the paper asserted.

Al Qaeda also used diamonds purchased in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, tanzanite from Tanzania and other commodities to make money and hide assets. But gold played a uniquely important role in the group’s financial structure, investigators and intelligence sources quoted by the Post said, because it is a global currency.

Pakistan financial authorities, the paper claims, say $2 million to $3 million a day is usually hand-carried by couriers from Karachi to Dubai, mostly to buy gold. Late last year that amount increased significantly as money was moved out of Afghanistan, they said. Pakistan and US officials estimate that about $10 million from Afghanistan was taken out by courier over three weeks in late November and early December. The Taliban fled Kabul late on Nov. 12 and abandoned Kandahar on Dec. 7.

One of the couriers of cash and gold to Dubai was the Taliban Consul-general in Karachi, Kaka Zada, who took at least one shipment of $600,000 to Dubai in the last week of November, according to two Pakistani sources who witnessed him carrying the money.

The WP report says US investigators, led by the Customs Service, have begun poring over transactions of some of Dubai’s largest and most prestigious gold brokerages for possible links to the movement of Al Qaeda or Taliban money, and have found unusual gold shipments into the United States after September 11.

The Pakistan-owned ARY Gold also figured in the Post story, which says: “A Customs official said that as part of efforts to ‘investigate terrorist financing,’ the agency was ‘scrutinizing movements of gold by several companies, including ARY Gold,’ one of Dubai’s largest and most prestigious gold bullion and jewellry dealers.

“ARY’s cramped headquarters is located in the heart of Dubai’s gold market — an area several blocks square, filled with stores that sell little else. Abdul Razzak, the Pakistan owner of ARY Gold, strongly denied knowingly doing business with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

“I am a God-fearing person, but all my life I have been afraid of religious people like the Taliban,” said Razzak. “I wouldn’t like to deal with Taliban people, and we don’t like Taliban people. If you say you want 100 kilos [220 pounds] of gold, I can give you that wherever you want in 12 hours. What you do with it is your business,” he said.

The Post recalls that in 1998, Pakistani investigators looking into government corruption found two cheques, each for $5 million, allegedly paid by ARY Gold in 1994 to Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of then-prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to secure a two-year monopoly on gold imports to Pakistan. While acknowledging he held the monopoly and shipped $500 million in gold to Pakistan from 1994 to 1996, Razzak said that he had paid no bribes and that “enemies” had falsified the bank documents. Razzak was cleared of criminal charges in Dubai but still faces charges in Pakistan from that case, Pakistan authorities said.

The “financial architecture” built by Al Qaeda was modelled, according to French, Pakistani and American investigators, on the collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). “The BCCI was founded by Pakistanis and bankrolled largely by leaders of the UAE. In the 1980s it was used to launder drug money, harbour terrorist funds and buy illegal weapons. Its collapse in 1991 was a major global financial scandal... The CIA used BCCI to funnel millions of dollars to the fighters battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Osama had accounts in the bank. The bank also specialized in dealing in commodities such as diamonds and gold,” the paper said.

The Post cites a 70-page French intelligence report, outlining some details of the network. “The financial network of bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people (former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants oil merchants, Saudi investors). “The dominant trait of bin Laden’s operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure.”

The paper goes on to say US agencies are looking into these ties because “they just make so much sense, and so few people from BCCI ever went to jail. BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.”

The report identifies dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with Osama bin Laden after the bank collapsed. Many went on to work in banks and charities identified by the United States and others as supporting Al Qaeda.