Bin Laden appoints Iraq chief

An audio tape claiming to be the voice to be Osama bin Laden tonight endorsed terror leader Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi as his deputy in Iraq and called for a boycott of next month’s elections.

Al-Jazeera satellite television quoted the tape in a news summary but had not broadcast the recording.

Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, leads a group called al-Qaida in Iraq, which is responsible for numerous car bombings and beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq, including Briton Ken Bigley.

This was the second tape by bin Laden to surface this month.

An audiotape posted on an Islamic Web site on December 16 had a man identified as Osama bin Laden praising militants who attacked a US consulate in Saudi Arabia earlier this month and calling on militants to stop the flow of oil to the West.

Bin Laden, believed hiding in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, before that reached out to his followers in October, with a videotape aired on Al-Jazeera just before the US presidential elections.

In that statement, he for the first time clearly took responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the United States and said America could avoid another such strike if it stopped threatening the security of Muslims.