'G-20' finance ministers back anti-terror measures

Finance ministers of the Group of 20 nations agreed to freeze the assets of terrorists and implement a sweeping UN resolution against terrorist financing.

With scores of riot police outside keeping protesters away from their meeting site, the ministers adopted an 'action plan on terrorist financing'.

Canadian finance minister Paul Martin, the meeting's host, called the strategy a decisive step in coordinating global resources.

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

Saudi Arabia has supported the US-led anti-terrorism campaign but faces internal pressure from groups who share the views of bin Laden.

Mr Martin says the G-20 nations agreed to move as quickly as possible on the plan, which also calls for making public the lists of terrorists with frozen assets and establishing or maintaining Financial Intelligence Units in each country to track terrorist financing.

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

"One of the things that's happening here is we're learning as we're going," Paul Martin said.

In the streets, hundreds of protesters opposed to the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan and the effects of globalisation on the world's poor marched through the city and burned US flags at a downtown rally.