TOP designers, including Burberry and Louis Vuitton, are warning that profits from cheap fakes sold on the high street and the internet may be used to fund Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations.

The warning — backed by Interpol — comes amid rising concern about the number of counterfeit items imported into Britain. Seizures of fashion copies have more than tripled since 2001.

The designers are urging customers to think about who profits from the sale of fake goods. Intelligence experts believe that terrorists and organised crime syndicates are increasingly using counterfeit goods to raise money.

Stuart Lockyear, director of intellectual property at Burberry, said: “The links of counterfeiting with terrorist organisations, including Al-Qaeda, are becoming much clearer.

“People need to think about where their money is going and the often appalling conditions in which these items are produced.”

Louis Vuitton confirmed last week that it was aware of evidence linking counterfeit goods with terrorism.

One company source said: “There is a huge amount of money being made in counterfeit goods and most groups raising money for terrorism will have a counterfeiting arm.”

Customers who snap up cheap replicas of luxury brands may be sceptical of the motives for such a warning. Interpol has confirmed, however, that the counterfeiting trade has been exploited by Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

John Newton, an Interpol officer who specialises in intellectual property crime, said: “North African radical fundamentalist groups in Europe, Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah all derive income from counterfeiting. This crime has the potential to become the preferred source of funding for terrorists.”

A high proportion of the revenue raised for Al-Qaeda is believed to come from “zakat”, a form of charitable giving to mosques based on religious obligation.

Interpol says that it has evidence of such donations being made by counterfeiters in north Africa.

Similar payments are suspected in Pakistan, which has a thriving counterfeit trade. Nisar Sarwar, head of Pakistan’s Royal IPR Security Services, which investigates fake goods, said: “It’s now a menace. In every street you find people making fake labels.

“People make the garments at one facility and then fix them with fake tags at another. Every brand is copied over here.”

Earlier this year police raided two factories in Faisalabad and Gujranwala, Pakistan’s two leading industrial cities, and arrested the owners who were producing replicas of Boss and Lacoste clothes. The fake products were due to be shipped to London.

In addition to the donations to mosques, Interpol says there is direct evidence of Al-Qaeda’s link with the counterfeit trade. In 2002 customs officers intercepted fake perfumes and other counterfeit goods en route from Dubai to Britain and later established it had been sent by an alleged member of Al-Qaeda.

In the same year in France, three suspected members of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which has links to Al-Qaeda, were arrested for involvement in counterfeiting. Seventy boxes of fake clothes were seized.

Christophe Zimmermann, a customs expert at the European commission, said: “We can’t say whether counterfeiting will fund a campaign of terrorist outrages, but the profits are huge.”

In a raid carried out in a southern European port last week, which Zimmermann declined to identify, customs authorities seized about 100,000 counterfeit Burberry and Vuitton bags, wallets and other goods.

The number of counterfeit goods imported to Britain is at a record high. In 2003 more than 1.54m fake items were seized by customs, compared with 466,000 in 2001.

About two-thirds of the seizures in 2003 were clothing and accessories. Of those, 18% were fake Louis Vuitton goods, 11% Burberry and 11% Nike sportswear.

Additional reporting: John Follain in Paris, Ghulam Hasnain in Karachi

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