Posted on 6-1-2004

Bin Laden is alive

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, today said he believed Osama bin Laden is alive.
An audiotape purporting to carry a message from al-Qaida's leader was yesterday broadcast on the Arabic television channel al-Jazeera, urging Muslims to rise up against US forces in Iraq.

Mr Straw said it was a safe assumption that the tape was a genuine recording of Bin Laden.

The tape made direct reference to the capture of the deposed Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, suggesting it was recorded recently and that the man the US blames for the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington has survived a two-year manhunt.

"As far as we know, Osama bin Laden is still alive," Mr Straw told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

"It is possible still today despite all the benefits of technology for an individual, if he's well resourced as Osama bin Laden unquestionably is and supported by some groups, to be effectively hidden for quite a period."

He added that searching for him remained a "key issue".

From video footage of Bin Laden produced in the past two years, intelligence officials have concluded he is holed up somewhere in the remote region straddling the Afghan-Pakistan border. Al-Qaida and Taliban elements are believed to be behind regular clashes there with the US occupying force and its Afghan allies.

Yesterday's tape was the first message supposedly from Bin Laden since an audiotape broadcast in October.

Ibrahim Hilal, al-Jazeera's editor-in-chief, told the Associated Press news agency that the network had received the latest message on Sunday. He declined to say how it had been delivered. About 14 minutes of a meandering 47-minute tape were aired.

Unlike previous recordings, the voice introduces itself as Osama bin Laden at the beginning of the tape. It was particularly critical of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden's birthplace, but also attacked other Arab governments for supporting the US invasion of Iraq.

It called on Muslims to "continue the jihad to check the conspiracies hatched against the Islamic nation" and warned that the US would not stop with the fall of Baghdad.

"The occupation of Iraq is the beginning of the full occupation of the other Gulf states," it said. "The Gulf is the key for control of the world in the point of view of the big powers, because of the presence of the biggest deposits of oil."

In the past, this kind of broadcast has preceded al-Qaida attacks, and US intelligence officials believe they could be used as a signal to cells around the world, or as an attempt to gain credit for attacks by showing prior knowledge.

Al-Jazeera has run eight al-Qaida tapes since September 2001. The channel has been criticised as being a propaganda tool for terrorists, but it recently said it did not rush to go on air with Bin Laden's recordings.

The Arabic news channel claimed it has at least half a dozen more video tapes from Bin Laden's al-Qaida network that it has never broadcast because it deemed them too fanatical or not sufficiently newsworthy.