Sanctions on al-Qaida must be upgraded or risk irrelevancy, UN panel chief says

With al-Qaida-related terrorism posing as great a threat as ever, the head of the United Nations committee monitoring sanctions against the group today called for "pressing on the accelerator a lot more" to strengthen steps to cut off financing and prevent the terrorists from obtaining a dirty bomb or other means of mass destruction.

"We need to be ahead of the terrorists - not behind them - and they have had a great deal of flexibility to adapt to our sanctions," Chilean Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz, Chairman of a UN Security Council Committee monitoring sanctions against al-Qaida and the Taliban, told a news conference in New York on a new report by the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team.

"We are at a critical juncture," he warned. "We either strengthen the sanctions regime that the UN Security Council has implemented or we risk those sanctions falling into irrelevancy."

The report recommended strengthening the sanctions, which were first imposed in response to the indictment of Usama bin Laden for the 1998 terrorist bombings of United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Mr. Muñoz said his committee would pass the monitoring team's recommendations on to the Security Council for action.

"We need to press the accelerator a lot more. We did in January. We advanced a great deal," Mr. Muñoz said of earlier recommendations. "But I think we were too timid and I think this report underlines the need to go in the direction that nobody went that nobody explored in January. We need definitely to have the Security Council make a pronouncement on these recommendations."

Among the team's proposals is the need to design effective measures to curb al-Qaida's ability to construct non-conventional bombs to cause mass casualties, including chemical, biological or radioactive devices. The team said it would join with other international bodies to assess the availability of components or expertise for such weapons and make appropriate recommendations.

It also said it would make proposals to curb the flow of funding, which together with the arms embargo and a travel ban are among the major sanctions aimed at hamstringing al-Qaida terrorists.

"Even though a great deal needs to be done, we want do win the struggle against terrorism, but we are far yet from achieving that goal," Mr. Muñoz said, adding that there was no other international body except the UN Security Council that is up to the task. "The best way to work is through concerted multilateral action," he declared.