Bin Laden says terror attacks 'blessed' in latest video

2:45 pm

DUBAI – In his latest video broadcast Osama bin Laden says the West loathes Islam and the September 11 attacks were aimed at US support for Israel.

"It is very clear that the West in general, spearheaded by America, holds an indescribable amount of Crusader loathing for Islam, and that those who have lived all these months under the constant bombing...know this for a fact," he said in a video broadcast today by the independent al-Jazeera television.

Looking tired but calm, bin Laden said the video tape marked about three months since the attacks on New York and Washington in which more than 3,000 people died, and two months after the United States began its bombing of Afghan targets.

He said he was speaking "three months after the blessed attack against international infidels and its leaders, the United States, and two months after the beginning of the vicious aggression against Islam."

The remarks indicated the tape might have been recorded in early to mid December, and in what appeared to be in daylight.

Reference to the Crusaders is a particularly emotive one for Arabs and Muslims, for it harks back to successive invasions by medieval European Christians with a penchant for massacre.

The millionaire dissident, who the United States says masterminded the September 11 attacks, cited damage caused by US bombers to a mosque in eastern Afghanistan in mid-November as evidence of Western hostility toward Muslims.

The Pentagon had reported an errant 230 kg bomb which struck the mosque was one of three dropped on a building complex in Khost, close to Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan.

Bin Laden - subject of a $25 million reward and a massive international manhunt - was dressed in a clean, camouflage-patterned combat smock. He sat facing the camera in front of a cloth or canvas screen, his Russian-designed sub-machinegun propped beside him.

He looked directly at the camera and at other times he appeared to be observing whatever was going on behind it.

Occasionally he waved one hand to emphasise a point in a rambling, improvised address which Jazeera, the Arab world's only independent satellite television service, finally cut short in mid-sentence.

He accused the West of double standards in the bombing offensive against Afghanistan's erstwhile rulers, the Taleban, and its attacks on his al Qaeda network.

"When the youths detonated (bombs) in Nairobi of less than two tons, America said that this was a terrorist strike and that this was a weapon of mass destruction, but it has used two bombs, each weighing seven tons, and it is not ashamed of that.

"It is their right to annihilate people as long as they are Muslims and not Americans. This is a crime of its clearest form," he declared.

On August 7, 1998, blasts shook Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in a tightly synchronised attack on US embassies in the two cities. Bin Laden was blamed for the assaults, which killed 224 people and wounded more than 4,000.

Bin Laden said Washington had attacked Afghanistan on mere suspicion of involvement.

"How many (Afghan) villages were annihilated without committing any crime? How many, if we calculate, millions of people were made homeless during the biting cold, and how many of these oppressed men, women and children are now sheltering in tents in Pakistan? "They have not committed any crime. America launched this campaign based on a suspicion."

In Washington, the Defence Department said it was not immediately sure what to make of the video tape.

"I don't know if it's real, if it's new, if it's old," said Richard McGraw, a senior Pentagon spokesman.

- REUTERS

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