Dr. Abdel Rahim Ali calls for lifting secrecy on bank accounts of terrorists

Dr. Abdel Rahim Ali, Chairman of the Center for Middle East Studies in Paris (CEMO), Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of The Reference, has called for lifting the banking secrecy on accounts of terrorists worldwide. He has noted that there are too many bank accounts worth billions of US dollars.

Such a move will uproot funding resources for terrorist organizations, i.e. Daesh, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Many charity societies claim they build mosques and help the needy, providing 20 percent of resources to this end, while the remainder (80 percent) is spent on the funding of terrorist operations," Ali told Monte Carlo Doualiya radio station in Paris on the sidelines of a seminar for combatting terrorism.

He called for international cooperation for joint crackdown on these secret bank accounts.

Ali added that some funds are transferred to Brotherhood-linked societies in London and Paris through diplomatic bags. "The Muslim Brotherhood would later send these funds to terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq. This is a serious dilemma," he said.

"Daesh has a surplus of funds exceeding $3 billion. The Brotherhood has more than $60 billion. Al-Qaeda has between $6 billion to $9 billion," he said, noting that terrorist organizations use people without any criminal record or any terrorist connections.