New Bin Laden video praises hijackers

 

 

By The Associated Press

CAIRO, Egypt- A new Osama bin Laden videotape released Tuesday on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks shows one of the suicide hijackers speaking his last will and testament into the camera as his image is superimposed upon an image of a burning World Trade Center.

The videotape had not yet been posted on extremist web sites. But the IntelCenter, a monitoring group in suburban Washington, said it had obtained the videotape privately and provided it to Associated Press Television News.

The video began with a still photo of bin Laden in front of a brown backdrop. The terror leader, in a voiceover, is heard saying: “This talk of mine consists of some reflections on the will of a young man who personally penetrated the most extreme degrees of danger and is a rarity among men: one of the 19 champions (may Allah have mercy on them all).”

Then, the videotape appears of Sept. 11 hijacker Walid al-Shehri, who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 that hit the World Trade Center.

“We shall come at you from your front and back, your right and left,” al-Shehri said in the tape, asserting that America would suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union.

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In the tape, al-Shehri also praised the losses the United States suffered in Somalia in the late 1990s.

“As for our own fortune, it is not in this world,” he said. “And we are not competing with you for this world, because it does not equal in Allah’s eyes the wing of a mosquito.”

The voice said to be bin Laden’s identifies the hijacker as Abu Mus’ab al-Shehri and describes him as “one of these magnificent men.”

“Abu Mus’ab and his brothers made a covenant with Allah that they would be victorious for his religion and they were true to their covenant and they died without having changed,” the voice said.