G-20 agrees on plan to take terrorist assets

OTTAWA -- Finance ministers for the Group of 20 agreed Saturday to freeze assets of terrorists and implement a sweeping U.N. resolution against terrorist financing.

With dozens of riot police outside keeping protesters well away from the meeting site, officials from the European Union, the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and 15 other nations adopted an "action plan on terrorist financing" during talks Friday night and Saturday.

Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin, the meeting's host, called the plan a decisive step in coordinating global resources and support for cutting off funds for groups like Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaida network, blamed for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.

"Every single member of the G-20, without exception, has signed on to that action plan," Martin said.

That included Saudi Arabia, which has supported the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign but faces internal pressure from hardline Muslims who share the views of bin Laden, a Saudi exile.

Martin said the G-20 nations agreed to move as quickly as possible on the anti-terrorism plan, which also calls for making public lists of terrorists with frozen assets and maintaining financial intelligence units in each country to track terrorist financing.

He conceded it would take time to get countries outside the G-20 to sign on, and "even longer" to halt the informal methods of money laundering used by terrorists.

Outside in the streets, hundreds of protesters opposed to the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan and what they say of the ill effects of globalization on the world's poor marched through the city and burned U.S. flags at a downtown rally.

The closed-door G-20 meeting began a weekend of discussions by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank also focusing on the lagging global economy. The IMF-World Bank gathering was postponed from a session that had been set for Washington in late September.