UNITED NATIONS - The al-Qaida terror network spent less than $50,000 on each of its major attacks, except the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, and one of its hallmarks is using readily available items like cell phones and knives as weapons, a U.N. report says.

The report released Thursday by a new team monitoring the implementation of U.N. sanctions against al-Qaida and the Taliban detailed just how little it cost to mount terror operations.

For example, the report said the March attacks in the Spanish capital, Madrid, in which nearly 10 simultaneous bombs exploded on four commuter trains, used mining explosives and cell phones as detonators and cost about $10,000 to carry out. The blasts killed 191 people, Spain's worst terror attack.

Only the sophisticated attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, using four hijacked aircraft "required significant funding of over six figures," the report said. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks, the vast majority in the collapse of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.

It cited al-Qaida's transformation from an organization with an established base supporting Afghan fighters run by Osama bin Laden, "to its current manifestation as a loose network of affiliated underground groups" with common goals.

The global network of groups doesn't wait for orders from above but launches attacks against targets of their own choosing, using minimal resources and exploiting worldwide publicity "to create an international sense of crisis," the report said.

The twin nightclub bombings in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002 killed 202 people and cost less than $50,000. So did the twin truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, which killed 231 people, including 12 Americans, the report said. And the November 2003 attacks in Istanbul, Turkey - four suicide truck bombings that killed 62 people - cost less than $40,000.