CAIRO, 23 May 2003 — A cassette tape attributed to Egyptian militant Ayman Al-Zawahiri calling for more suicide attacks against Westerners is a genuine recording of his voice, an Egyptian lawyer said yesterday.

“It’s his voice, his style and his manner,” Montasser Al-Zayat, a lawyer who has represented militant suspects in Egypt, told AFP.

The tape also proves that Zawahiri, the right-hand man of fugitive Al-Qaeda terror network leader Osama Bin Laden, “is alive, in good health and safe,” Zayat added.

In the message aired by Qatar’s Al-Jazeera satellite channel, Zawahiri urged Muslims to force Westerners out of their lands by attacking them and emulating the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide hijackings in the United States.

Asked about Bin Laden’s fate, Zayat said he is also “safe” with Zawahri, but that “security conditions” sometimes require that one or the other speaks out.

The fate of Zawahiri and Bin Laden as well as other top Al-Qaeda members has been a mystery since the United States launched its war against Al-Qaeda bases and their Taleban supporters in Afghanistan in October 2001.

Another expert on Islamic militants, Dia Al-Rashwan was asked if he thought the voice was Zawahiri’s, and he said: “I believe so.”

He said the message bore Zawahiri’s hallmark emphasis on Islamic militant attacks against Arab governments allied to the United States.

Bin Laden has always stressed international targets, and Zawahiri has gradually shown more support for such attacks without forgetting Arab targets, according to Rashwan, a journalist with Egypt’s government daily Al-Ahram.

It was clear that Zawahiri “is still second in command” of Al-Qaeda and that his stress on “local (Arab) targets” was influencing not only statements and actions by Al-Qaeda but also groups inspired by them, Rashwan added.

Rashwan said he was unable to shed much light on suspicions that Seif Al-Adel, another Egyptian, might have mastermined the triple suicide bombings that killed 34 people, including nine bombers, in Riyadh on May 12. He and other Egyptian experts said Adel is Al-Qaeda’s No. 3 since becoming chief of military operations, succeeding Abu Hafs Al-Masri, who was killed during the war in Afghanistan.

Adel was a top member in the Egyptian Islamic militant movement Al-Jihad, which was led by Zawahiri and carried out many attacks in Egypt in the 1990s.

He left Egypt at the end of the 1980s for a Gulf Arab country before travelling to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, where he helped train militants at some camps, Egyptian sources said on condition they not be named.

He was close to both Zawahiri and Bin Laden, they added.