ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Dec. 11 -- Pakistan on Thursday closed 11 offices of a controversial Islamic charity that has been linked to last month's deadly attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai and placed the group's leader under house arrest. In India, top government officials announced a massive revamping of the country's security infrastructure, including creation of an FBI-style national agency to investigate terror attacks.

Hafiz Sayeed, the leader of the organization Jamaat-ud-Dawa, was put under house arrest in Lahore, according to a Pakistani foreign ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The arrest was confirmed by a top Jamaat-ud-Dawa official.

Sayeed was one of four individuals singled out by the United Nations Security Council late Wednesday when it placed Jamaat-ud-Dawa on a list of designated terrorist organizations and imposed sanctions on the group, including a freeze on assets, a travel ban and an arms embargo. The U.N. also said the charity was directly linked to Lashkar-i-Taiba, the outlawed Pakistani militant group that Indian authorities blame for the three-day siege in Mumbai that killed at least 171 people, including six Americans.

"Pakistan has taken note of the designation of certain individuals and entities by the U.N.," Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani said in a statement hours before the house arrest, noting that the country would "fulfill its international obligations."

Also included in the sanctions were Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the alleged operational commander and architect of the Mumbai attacks, and alleged Lashkar financiers Haji Muhammad Ashraf and Mahmoud Ahmed Bahaziq. Pakistani security forces arrested Lakhvi Sunday.

Before arresting Sayeed late Thursday, Pakistan shuttered nine Karachi offices of Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the group's main offices in Lahore and Muridke. Jamaat official Amir Hamza said Thursday night that 70 to 80 members of the organization were rounded up in raids that took place across the country. Hamza said Pakistani authorities had placed him and eight others on a wanted list and were preparing to arrest them.

"We are expecting to be picked up any minute," Hamza said. "We will fight our battles in court. We will not resort just to street protests. This is a great injustice."

Indian officials hailed Wednesday night's U.N. action as a long overdue step in the right direction, and called on Pakistan not to repeat a past pattern of arresting suspected extremists -- including Sayeed -- and then letting them go without standing trial..

"This only underscores what India has maintained throughout. That the forces of violence and terror, the organized groups which have attacked India on many occasions . . . pose a threat to civil world," Indian Deputy Foreign Minister Anand Sharma said.

Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told the country's parliament that Pakistan needed to follow up on its promises of action against militant groups. "They are banning organizations. Lashkar-i-Taiba was banned. But simply they are changing names, they are changing signboards," Mukherjee said. "Faces are the same, ideology are the same. How does it help us?"

Sayeed reacted to the imposition of sanctions with a news conference at his Lahore headquarters, hours before he was placed under house arrest. He denied reports that he had met with a Mumbai attacker and said his group split from Lashkar after Pakistan banned Lashkar following a 2001 attack on India's parliament. Sayeed said Jamaat-ud-Dawa would lodge a strong protest with the U.N. and the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

"Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a thorn in the eye of India because Jamaat-ud-Dawa does not support anything which India does to Pakistan or Kashmir," Sayeed said.

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) -- World leaders convened Saturday for a second straight day hoping to tackle a financial crisis that has ricocheted across the globe and left the United States and other countries on the brink of deep recessions.

Their goal: to prevent a similar calamity from happening again.

The historic two-day summit meeting, which brought together prime ministers and presidents from Group of 20 countries, was in full swing Saturday following an extravagant working dinner at the White House.

"We had a good frank discussion last night," President Bush said. "There's some progress being made, but there's still a lot more work to be done."

The conference participants were aiming to figure out what caused the global crisis and assess government responses to it, Bush said Friday. The summit would also identify regulatory reforms and launch a "specific action plan" to implement them, he said.

"Billions of hardworking people are counting on us to strengthen our financial systems for the long term," he added.

Bush and fellow G-20 leaders are expected to issue a statement at about 3 p.m. ET on the findings of the summit.

Still, many experts anticipate that announcement to be light on specifics.

"I think it is going to be pretty vague," said Simon Johnson, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. "You could call it productive chaos."

In the days leading up to the summit, speculation abounded that leaders would accomplish little else but narrowing the focus for future talks - likely to be held in the first few months of 2009 after U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is sworn into office.

Obama is not attending this weekend's summit. He sent as emissaries former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa.

Bush, who offered to host the meeting nearly a month ago, echoed those exact sentiments in remarks made earlier this week. The imminent change in power at the White House has led many to believe that could also hamper any progress.

Attendees of the summit include leaders from such nations as China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Japan.

The pace of the world's financial problems - rooted in large part in the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the risky lending and borrowing that went along with it - have accelerated in recent weeks.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group based in Paris, said this week that the gross domestic product for its 30 members was likely to fall by 0.3% in 2009.

Major indexes around the globe have fallen off a cliff over the last two months. The Russian stock market has lost 65.5% of its value since the start of the year. Stocks in Japan and the United States have been equally hard hit, falling 42% and 33%, respectively.

In Europe, the pain has been particularly acute. The European Union on Friday officially declared that the 15-nation group had entered into a recession, with its gross domestic product declining 0.2% for the second straight quarter.

And other countries have nearly collapsed under the weight the economic crisis.

In Iceland, where the government intervened to save the banking system from total failure, inflation is running at a painful 12.1% while economic growth has nearly flatlined.

Hoping to halt the contagion, central bankers and government officials have taken unprecedented steps in recent weeks.

Britain, France and the United States have bought ownership stakes in banks and pumped them full of capital in the hopes of unlocking frozen credit markets. Earlier this week, China unveiled a massive, $585 billion economic stimulus package to try to keep its once red-hot economy moving forward.

With the crisis showing no signs of abating, several leaders have been trying to advance an agenda for the talks, which some observers have referred to as "Bretton Woods II" - a nod to a similar global economic summit held in July 1944 to reverse some of the painful trade and foreign exchange policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression.

There have been calls, for example, to create a global accounting standard to replace the current mark-to-market standard, which some have blamed for the billions of dollars of losses suffered by banks.

Credit rating agencies and hedge funds have also become a target. French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who has embraced a hard-line approach toward regulation, has publicly said he is in favor of greater oversight of both industries.

And there has also been speculation that additional countries could enact economic stimulus packages of their own in the wake of the talks.

One underlying fear that President Bush attempted to address in recent days, including in an op-ed piece he wrote in Saturday's edition of The Wall Street Journal, is rising protectionism.

There is concern that some countries could levy harsh tariffs on imports to prop up their ailing economies, or that some governments could try to restrict capital flows, which spelled disaster for many emerging economies as the crisis gained momentum.

But what is expected to remain front and center is the subject of regulation and how to best modernize the global financial system for the 21st century.

One approach could involve granting greater powers to the Financial Stability Forum, which represents central bankers and regulators, or the International Monetary Fund, which has played a large role in recent weeks helping to bail out struggling countries.

Another possibility could involve the creation of a college of regulatory supervisors that would exchange notes about some of the trends and risks they are seeing within their own borders.

European Union leaders backed a 100-day deadline by which the world's leading economies should decide urgent global finance reforms, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday.

Sarkozy, who chaired a special meeting of EU nations, said the financial crisis and economic downturn required a quick deal on an overhaul at a Nov. 15 summit in Washington bringing together leaders of the world's 20 largest industrialized nations and emerging economies.

"We are in an economic crisis. We have to take this into account," Sarkozy said. "We have to react and we have no time to lose."

"I'm not going to take part in a summit where there is just talk for talk's sake," Sarkozy told reporters after talks between the heads of the EU's 27 nations.

The EU is calling for a second global summit next spring to flesh out changes to the way the world economy is governed. They want to see far more supervision of big financial companies and are urging governments to jointly monitor them.

They want to prevent a repeat of the Wall Street excesses that caused havoc in markets worldwide -- and are bringing emerging economies China, India and Brazil on board for talks on shaping a new world economic order.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the Washington talks should be a "decisive moment for the world economy."

A text agreed by EU leaders says they want an early warning system that would watch for financial bubbles and prevent "world imbalances" -- such as the swelling U.S. trade deficit.

They also suggest making the International Monetary Fund the world's financial watchdog, suggesting it be given more power to curb financial crises and give more money to aid countries in trouble.

The Europeans also want to close loopholes that allow some financial institutions to evade regulation, and ensure supervision for all major financial players, including ratings agencies or funds carrying high amounts of debt.

The leaders in a declaration called for greater transparency in markets that would no longer omit "vast swathes of financial activity from auditable, certifiable accounts." It also said "excessive risk-taking must be overhauled," a reference to the sale of high-risk debt securities and executive pay that may reward risk-taking.

EU leaders will call on the Nov. 15 summit to agree immediately on five principles: submit ratings agencies to more surveillance; align accounting standards; close loopholes; set banking codes of conduct to reduce excessive risk-taking; and ask the International Monetary Fund to suggest ways of calming the turmoil.

To date, European governments alone have committed some 2 trillion euros ($2.6 trillion) in cash injections, bank deposit guarantees, interbank loan coverage and partial or full nationalization to prop up consumer and business confidence.

The damage done worldwide is fueling a search for a "new Bretton Woods" -- a reference to the post-World War II conference that shaped the international financial system.

In Washington, there is little desire in the waning days of the Bush administration for a major overhaul of financial regulations.

But the United States and European nations are no longer the only players. China and Brazil and India are jumping at the chance to join a major international effort.

G-20 finance officials nations will meet this weekend in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to prepare next week's summit. This may pave the way for emerging economies to play a larger role in global finance talks. France is suggesting bring them on board as members of the exclusive world club of G-8 industrialized nations which regularly meets to discuss the global economy.

------

Associated Press writers Robert Wielaard, Tobias Schmidt, Constant Brand and Paul Ames in Brussels, Alan Clendenning in Sao Paulo, Gillian Wong in Beijing and David Stringer in London contributed to this report.

No. 2 Leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq Killed

BAGHDAD, Oct. 15 -- The U.S. military on Wednesday announced the death of a man it described as the No. 2 leader of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The military said it killed the leader known as Abu Qaswarah on Oct. 5 during an operation in the northern city of Mosul in which four other alleged al-Qaeda in Iraq members were slain.

Abu Qaswarah, who also used the alias Abu Sara, directed the group's operations in northern Iraq, where al-Qaeda in Iraq remains entrenched and has been blamed for recent large-scale attacks, the military said.

The Moroccan native was the deputy of al-Qaeda in Iraq's leader, known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, and he had "historic ties" to the group's founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in June 2006, the military said in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon. Masri is believed to be an Egyptian whose real name is Yusuf al-Dardiri.

"Abu Qaswarah is another example of how al-Qaeda in Iraq has been forced to rely on foreign terrorists to carry out their vicious attacks on the Iraqi people as well as coalition and Iraqi forces," said Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, a U.S. military spokesman. "Terrorists who bring radical and fanatic Islam into Iraq commit murderous acts against the people of Iraq and have no place in the future of Iraq." 

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a largely homegrown group that U.S. officials say is led by non-Iraqi Arabs. The U.S. military and the Iraqi army have in recent months cracked down on the group in Baghdad and in Diyala and Anbar provinces. As the group lost members and support from the population in former strongholds, many of its leaders moved to Mosul, an ethnically mixed city that is Iraq's third largest.

The U.S. military said soldiers searching for Abu Qaswarah were shot at when they arrived at a building in Mosul that the insurgent group used as a command center. U.S. soldiers returned fire, killing five men, including Abu Qaswarah. The military said it did not disclose his death sooner because it was awaiting confirmation of his identity.

Describing Abu Qaswarah as a "charismatic" leader who rallied al-Qaeda in Iraq's northern network following major setbacks across the country, the military said he planned attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops in Mosul and oversaw a foiled attempt to destroy the Mosul Civic Center last month, an attack that could have killed hundreds of people during Ramadan.

The military also said Abu Qaswarah trained in Afghanistan and found ways to get foreign fighters into northern Iraq.

While violence in Iraq is at a four-year low, U.S. military officials say they remain deeply concerned about security in Mosul.

Hundreds of Christian families have fled their homes in Nineveh province, which includes Mosul, amid a wave of slayings targeting Christians in recent weeks.

Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said economic and political problems in Nineveh have worked to the advantage of insurgents. The predominantly Sunni Arab province is run by Kurds, because the Sunni Arabs boycotted the 2005 election. Many of the province's citizens are leery of the Iraqi army there, which is a largely Kurdish force. And the police forces in Mosul remain infiltrated by extremists, Odierno said.

"If the population feels they are not being supported by the provincial government and the provincial council, they may not want al-Qaeda there, but they will give them passive support," Odierno said.

Pressure on the group in Iraq has led its leaders to encourage followers to travel to Afghanistan, that country's defense minister told a news conference in Kabul Tuesday.

"The success of coalition forces in Iraq and also some other issues in some of the neighboring countries have made it possible that there is a major increase in the foreign fighters," Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak said. "They are well-trained, more sophisticated; their coordination is much better."

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 30, 2008; Page A01