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Bin Laden Video Praises Cole Bombing
WASHINGTON, June 21 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A darkly clad figure, head and face wrapped in black, strikes a menacing pose before a wide-screen television displaying images of American politicians. Former president Bill Clinton's face appears, close-up, and the figure lifts its hands, aiming a weapon directly at the image's head.
Another Hollywood Arab-terrorist movie?
No, it's actually an alleged recruitment video for al-Qaeda, the famed "terrorist" group associated with Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.
Copies of the 100-minute tape, which shows pictures Al-Qaeda, or "The Base", have been circulated to a limited number of Islamic activists, and one was obtained by Kuwait's daily Al-Rai Al-Aam newspaper.
Aside from the images which have come to represent "Islamic terrorism" in Western media - young boys in harsh military training, gunfire in the desert among Bedouin-like men, images expressing hatred of America - the video also shows bin Laden praising the attack on the USS Cole last October in Yemen that left 19 American sailors dead, news sources report.
The video shows members of al-Qaeda training at their al-Farouq base in Afghanistan, while singing revolutionary songs calling for jihad, or holy struggle, and resistance.
"Thanks to Allah for leading us to victory the day we destroyed the Cole at sea," says one of the songs.
In another clip, bin Laden is seen saying, "And in Aden, they charged and destroyed a destroyer that fearsome people fear, one that evokes horror when it docks and when it sails." Some sources say these clips link bin Laden to the Cole bombing, MSNBC reported.
Excerpts from the tape, in which bin Laden is also seen calling on his followers to "strike against Western and Jewish interests worldwide," are available as clips on numerous news websites.
Bin Laden has also threatened the life of U.S. President George W. Bush, according to the head of Russia's Federal Bodyguard Service Yevgeny Murov, Cable News Network said.
According to CNN, Murov told the Russian Itar-Tass news agency that bin Laden is planning to attack Bush at the upcoming G8 summit in Genoa, where leaders from Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Canada, Japan, the United States and Russia will meet from July 20-22.
But a spokesman for the ruling Taliban party in Afghanistan, where bin Laden has been living since 1996, said Thursday that bin Laden had not made any such threat against Bush, according to MSNBC reports.
U.S. Secret Service spokesman Mark Holland said in Washington that his agency knew about the reports of the threat and would take all the necessary precautions, MSNBC added.
The U.S. has indicted bin Laden for allegedly masterminding the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which more than 200 people were killed.
The Taliban government has refused to extradite bin Laden to the U.S., saying Washington never provided them any evidence that bin Laden was responsible for the bombings.
The U.S. has offered $5 million in reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of bin Laden.
Despite the bounty and U.N. sanctions imposed on the Taliban to pressure them into extraditing the Saudi dissident, bin Laden remains at large.
Ayesha Ahmad contributed to this report
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