DUBAI, 20 February 2004 — Audiotapes purported to be from Osama Bin Laden’s top lieutenant aired on Arabic TV stations yesterday, one taunting US President George W. Bush and threatening more attacks, the second criticizing French plans to ban headscarves in schools.
The tapes also criticized Mohammed Said Tantawi, the sheikh of the influential Al-Azhar Islamic Institute in Cairo, for saying that the French had the right to make their own legal decisions about headscarves.
Portions of separate audiotapes attributed to Ayman Al-Zawahiri were broadcast a few hours apart on Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera.
Dia’a Rashwan, an expert on radical Islam in the region at Egypt’s Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, said the tapes appeared to be a response by Al-Zawahiri or Al-Qaeda’s media machine to reports US forces are closing in on Bin Laden and his aide in the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Rashwan said he believed both tapes were authentic and that issuing them at about the same time to the two stations “requires logistical ability... and also a central decision to be able to do that. This is not insignificant organizational capabilities.”
“Bush, fortify your targets, tighten your defense, intensify your security measures,” the voice warned, “because the fighting Islamic community — which sent you New York and Washington battalions — has decided to send you one battalion after the other, carrying death and seeking heaven.”
In the tape broadcast by Al-Arabiya, the Egyptian-born Zawahiri attacked President Jacques Chirac for backing a ban on headscarves worn by Muslim students in French schools. It called Chirac “a hateful crusader” and the French ban a symbol of discrimination by the West against Muslims.
In Washington, CIA Director George Tenet told lawmakers that terrorist organizations have tried to recruit airline pilots and avoid the tighter security at airports in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
“On aircraft plots alone, we have uncovered new plans to recruit pilots and to evade new security measures in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe,” Tenet said at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on national security threats.
In another development, Asharq Al-Awsat revealed the “real” chief of Al-Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia is Yemeni Khaled Hajj rather than Saudi Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin, who is identified as the leader in the literature of the terror group. It said that Al-Qaeda had designated Muqrin as the nominal leader of the group in Saudi Arabia because he is Saudi and this would help ensure the continued support of its sympathizers.
