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Ban slams al-Zawahiri UN comments

A blistering attack on the UN by al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri was rejected yesterday by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as “totally false and unacceptable.”

Ban condemned Zawahiri’s statement in a morning get-together with UN staff in Romania’s capital Bucharest, where he is attending a three-day NATO summit that is discussing the situation in Afghanistan.

“The secretary general just told UN staff in Romania that the al-Qaeda statement was ‘totally false and unacceptable,’” a UN spokesman said by e-mail.

The spokesman added that Ban had earlier held discussions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on UN support for the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Islamic world.

“The secretary general was very clear today that United Nations should be seen as a friend of the Muslim world and that he was alarmed by the al-Qaeda accusations,” he said.

In an online audiofile on Wednesday, Zawahiri said: “The United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims: it is the one which codified and legitimized the setting up of the state of Israel and its taking over of the Muslims’ lands.”

The audio — released via the monitoring group the IntelCenter — was the first installment in a two-part series to answer about 100 questions put to Zawahiri, known as al-Qaeda’s ideological thinker, via online militant forums.

He grouped his replies into four sections — the killing of innocents, Iran, Egypt and Palestine — and denied that the al-Qaeda network had been responsible for the loss of innocent Muslim lives.

“We haven’t killed the innocents, not in Baghdad, nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria, nor anywhere else,” Zawahiri said in the audio lasting one hour and 43 minutes, which marked his third public message this year.

“And if there is any innocent who was killed in the Mujahedeen’s operations, then it was either an unintentional error, or out of necessity,” he said.

“Those who kill innocents are the Americans, the Jews, the Russians and the French and their agents,” he said.

Zawahiri was also asked by an Algerian medical student to justify the December suicide attacks on UN offices in Algiers in which at least 41 people, including 18 UN staffers — three of them foreign nationals — were killed.

But Zawahiri said those who died in Algeria were not innocent victims.

“Rather, according to the communique from the brothers in al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, they are from the Crusader unbelievers and the government troops who defend them,” he said.

The Algiers bombing had also brought back memories of the Aug. 19, 2003, suicide attack on UN offices in Baghdad, in which 22 people, including UN special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, were killed.

And in the wake of the attacks, the UN staff union demanded a security review of all UN installations around the world.

The UN had agreed to the presence of outsiders, dubbed “Crusaders” by Zawahiri, in Afghanistan and Iraq and had approved the separation of East Timor from Indonesia.

The terror network’s No. 2 also said that its leader Osama bin Laden, who has evaded capture by the US military since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US, was still alive.

“Sheikh Osama bin Laden is healthy and well by the grace of Allah,” Zawahiri said, adding of the widespread speculation about his health: “The prejudiced ones always try to spread false information about him being ill.”

Zawahiri warned of major changes in the Middle East region and warned the Palestinians of agreeing to any peace deal “which calls for setting up a Palestinian state on the parts of Palestine which were occupied after 1967 and forgetting the parts of Palestine which were stolen before that.”
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