A Pakistani newspaper editor who met Osama bin Laden for a rare interview said on Sunday that America's most wanted man denied he was behind the anthrax letter attacks which have shaken the US.
He also reported the al-Qaeda leader's claim that he possesses nuclear and chemical weapons.
Intelligence officials will be poring over every word that Hamid Mir has written since his two-hour meeting with bin Laden on Thursday at a secret location inside Afghanistan. It was the first interview he has given since the World Trade Center bombings and appears to hold precious clues about his current hideout.
Mir said he asked bin Laden if his al-Qaeda network was involved in the letter attacks in America, which have claimed four lives. "He laughed and said, `We don't know anything about it,'" Mir wrote in his Daily Ausaf newspaper on Sunday.
US investigators have been baffled by the anthrax attacks, which targeted media groups in New York and Florida and forced the closure of several government offices in Washington. Though it was at first suggested that bin Laden or even Iraq might be responsible, attention now appears to be turning to a US source.
Bin Laden was reported on Sunday to have made a separate statement in which he gives the first open admission that his network carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. A videotape said to have been circulating for two weeks among al-Qaeda supporters shows him giving his account of the attacks in which he refers to the Twin Towers as "legitimate targets" and the suicide hijackers as "blessed by Allah to destroy America's economic and military landmarks."
The tape will form the focus of a batch of evidence of bin Laden's guilt to be unveiled this week.
According to London's Sunday Telegraph, bin Laden is unashamed about killing civilians. "If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then history should be a witness that we are terrorists."
"Yes, we kill their innocents."
He also issued direct threats against US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "Bush and Blair don't understand anything but the power of force. Every time they kill us, we kill them, so the balance of terror can be achieved."
Mir's encounter with the world's most wanted man took place last week when the Pakistani editor was invited to Kabul for a clandestine meeting. He was picked up in the city on Wednesday night by Arab fighters, blindfolded, wrapped in a blanket and driven along rough roads for five hours.
When his blindfold was removed early on Thursday morning Mir found himself in a dark room. The temperature was low, suggesting he was high in the mountains. Minutes later bin Laden arrived with his deputy, Ayman el-Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian jihad.
"The floor of the room showed that this was a mud house arranged temporarily for the interview," Mir wrote in his Urdu-language newspaper. "On regular intervals one could hear anti-aircraft guns, so it was not difficult to guess that it was close to the frontline. Osama bin Laden looked confident, healthy and fresh."
Mir said the Saudi appeared undaunted by the military campaign. "He told me five times that `maybe this place will be bombed now and both of us will be killed,' and `I'm not scared of death,'" he said.
Bin Laden also promised to fight on even if major Afghan cities fell. "We will move to the mountains. We will continue our guerrilla warfare against the Americans," he told Mir.
In his first accounts of the meeting, Mir said bin Laden claimed he possessed nuclear and chemical weapons and might use them against the US. "We have the weapons as deterrent," he quoted bin Laden as saying.
On Sunday he said bin Laden refused to say where he obtained the weapons but said he suspected US forces were using chemical weapons. "Bodies of mujahidin found from a site in Kabul had all turned black," he told Mir.
The British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said he doubted that bin Laden had the ability to produce nuclear bombs, although he conceded that al-Qaeda was probably in possession of nuclear materials.
US officials believe bin Laden may have had more success in making chemical weapons. A site near the city of Jalalabad is thought to have been a chemical weapons research laboratory. The New York Times said on Sunday that al-Qaeda may have produced cyanide gas.
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