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Thu, Sep 13, 2001 - Page 4 News List

World: CIA nourished Osama bin Laden

UNHOLY WAR Commanding a force of men prepared to die attacking US interests, the man who is now public enemy number one was once a recipient of covert CIA aid

REUTERS , KABUL, AFGHANISTAN

He has denied responsibility for the 1998 embassy attacks.

The US retaliated after the embassy bombings by launching missile attacks on what it said were bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan and a chemicals factory in Sudan. The then US defense secretary William Cohen later admitted the strikes were partly aimed at "going after" bin Laden.

The US has also branded bin Laden the prime suspect in bombings which killed 24 US servicemen in the Saudi cities of Riyadh and Khobar in 1995 and 1996. He denies the charges.

Washington also believes that Islamic militants, possibly linked to bin Laden, were behind last year's bombing which killed 17 sailors on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.

Unbowed

Bin Laden has said that US efforts to arrest him and hurt him financially have had little effect.

"America has been trying ever since [a 1993 attack on US military personnel in Somalia] to tighten its economic blockade against us and to arrest me. It has failed. This blockade does not hurt us much. We expect to be rewarded by God," Time magazine quoted him as saying in an interview two years ago.

"Our job is to instigate and, by the grace of God, we did that, and certain people responded to this instigation," he said.

Bin Laden has been stripped of his Saudi citizenship.

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