Bin Laden tells Americans ‘you’ll never take me alive’

OSAMA bin Laden has vowed never to be captured alive and said the US military had become as “barbaric” as Saddam Hussein in an audiotape posted on a militant website.

The tape was the same as an audio first broadcast January 19 on Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite channel, in which bin Laden offered the US a long-term truce but also said his al-Qaida terror network would soon launch a fresh attack on American soil.

US intelligence officials confirmed that the January 19 tape was bin Laden making it his first message in more than a year.

“I have sworn to only live free. Even if I find bitter the taste of death, I don’t want to die humiliated or deceived,” bin Laden said.

In drawing the comparison to American military behaviour in Iraq to that of Saddam, he said: “The jihad (holy war) is ongoing, thank God, despite all the oppressive measures adopted by the US Army and its agents (which has reached) a point where there is no difference between this criminality and Saddam’s criminality... And I say that, despite all the barbaric methods, they have not broken the fierceness of the resistance.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign minister called yesterday for an end to violent protests over the Prophet Mohammed caricatures that have left at least 45 people dead in the Muslim world during the past month.

Pope Benedict XVI also tried to soothe the tensions, saying religious symbols must be respected but violence can never be justified. Malaysia’s prime minister warned that mistrust and fear of Islam is growing every day in the West.

In Afghanistan, where 11 people were killed in three days of prophet protests earlier this month, about 2,000 students protested yesterday, shouting “Long live Osama!,” burning Danish and American flags and photos of George Bush.

“We should try to cool down the situation. We do not support any violence,” Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said during a visit to Brussels.

“So many of our policemen were attacked by angry people on the streets.”

Mr Mottaki said he had contacted European foreign ministers as well as officials from Islamic countries, trying to calm the protests.

Demonstrations have turned increasingly violent and claimed at least 45 lives worldwide, including 15 who died in Nigeria on Saturday and 10 killed in the Libyan coastal city of Benghazi on Friday.

The Libyan riot outside the Italian consulate apparently was sparked by a right-wing Italian cabinet minister who wore a T-shirt bearing one of the prophet caricatures.

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller warned extremists would try to exploit the anger over the drawing.He condemned a Pakistani cleric’s offer last week of a $1 million bounty for killing one of the cartoonists behind the drawings as “insane” and tantamount to terrorism.