Brown vows war on terror funding

Mr Brown wants to set up a team of experts who will try cracking the complex network of money transactions.

In a speech on Monday, he will compare the difficulty of the task to the WWII code breakers at Bletchley decyphering the Nazi Enigma code.

Mr Brown will also announce measures to stop those financing terror from using charities as a cover.

Radical cleric

In his speech to the Royal United Services Institute, Mr Brown will also announce new proposals to tackle terrorist abuse of bureaux de change and wire transfers, a Treasury spokesman said.

He will announce further work with banks to ensure they tackle suspicious transactions, and outline a possible strengthening of the system for seizing assets of suspected terrorists or their sympathisers.

Since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the UK has frozen £80 million in terrorist assets, including funds from more than 100 organisations linked to al-Qaeda.

"As Chancellor, I have found increasingly that an important part of the role of a finance minister is to address issues of international terrorism," Mr Brown will say.

"And I have discovered that this requires an international operation using modern methods of forensic accounting as imaginative and path-breaking for our times as the Enigma code breakers at Bletchley Park achieved more than half a century ago," the speech will say.

The Treasury spokesman said that "Gordon Brown believes we must now create a specialist centre where Britain's best financial experts can work on identifying, tracking and breaking down terrorist financial networks."