Britain said yesterday that acts of terrorism could be carried out in the name of Osama bin Laden even after he has been captured or killed.
But the removal of the Saudi-born militant and his al Qaeda supporters remained an important aim of the US-led coalition in its campaign against Afghanistan.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said bin Laden, being hunted as the suspected mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the US, was not irreplaceable, though he enjoyed a big following."
"What we know from the way terrorist groups have operated in the past, even when they have been destroyed, is that those still at large may decide to carry out some further acts of terrorism," he said.
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said it was nevertheless still important for the coalition to "roll up" bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
"We will be cutting off its head, and that is the action that's being taken in Afghanistan, and I believe that the network will suffer significant damage as a result of that, and indeed such damage that it's perhaps harder to contemplate how it will carry on," he said.
Straw, who is due to address the UN General Assembly on Friday, called bin Laden a "psychotic and paranoid" person whose "theology is terror."
"Those words exist to describe people like this ... their complete detachment from the suffering of others and their absolute faith, conviction and obsession with the rightness of what they are saying," Straw said.
Straw said bin Laden's latest videotaped statement, in which he blasted the UN as an enemy of Islam, showed that he was increasingly isolated and practising "a religion of terrorism with which we are in conflict."
"[The video] shows a degree of hatred of humankind that is impossible to avoid," he said.
Straw also defended Prime Minister Tony Blair's active diplomatic efforts to gather support for the US strikes on Afghanistan, which aim to flush out bin Laden and his network.
"Every time a British diplomat moves around the world, he or she is complimented on what the prime minister and Britain have been doing," he said.
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