Bin Laden 'to appear on TV'

Osama bin Laden is alive and will appear on a videotape soon, a man who identified himself as a senior al-Qaida member told an Arabic weekly.

“Sheikh Osama is alive and in good health. He has gained more weight due to security precautions and his inability to move a lot as you will notice in his next appearance,” Abdel Rahman al-Rashed told the London-based Arabic-language magazine Al Majalla in remarks published Friday.

Mahmoud Khalil, a correspondent for the weekly, told AP today that he conducted the interview over a week in October through the Internet. He said it took him more than a month to arrange it.

Khalil, who is based in Dubai, said al-Rashed told him he was a Kuwaiti national.

“I used to send him one question every day and wait for his answer to send the other question,” Khalil said. He refused to say how he got in touch with al-Rashed.

In the interview, al-Rashed said bin Laden, whose al Qaida terror network is blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, is alive and will appear soon on a videotape with a new statement. He didn’t elaborate.

Al-Rashed was quoted as saying that bin Laden chose not to appear on a videotape on the first anniversary of the attacks, because he did not want people to “tie (his) victory to his character”.

“Bin Laden is completely indifferent to all claims that he was killed. He does not choose the time of his appearances to deny such claims,” al-Rashed said, according to the magazine.

Earlier this month, the Qatar-based satellite TV station al-Jazeera aired a voice tape in which a male voice attributed to bin Laden warned that the “youths of God” are planning more attacks against the United States.

Al-Jazeera said the voice was that of bin Laden, but there was no way to verify the claim.

US officials have said they don’t know whether bin Laden is still alive.

Focusing on what he described as al Qaida’s media strategy, al-Rashed told Al Majalla that al Qaida had set aside a budget for “a media department to address the Muslim people”. Sheikhk Osama pays heed to the media ... we have a specialised department for print, audio and video production and a team of Internet experts,” al-Rashed was quoted as saying.

In the interview, al-Rashed also denied US claims that al Qaida has relations with the Iraqi regime, saying that the reason behind any US attack on Iraq would be to control the Iraqi oil.

US President George W Bush has said al Qaida had had high-level contacts with Baghdad for a decade and sent operatives to Iraq to learn to make bombs and use poison weapons. Bush said some al Qaida leaders had fled to Iraq after their haven in Afghanistan was attacked by the United States in retaliation for September 11.