Suspected Sept. 11 terrorists shown in video

By Sarah El Deeb

Associated Press

CAIRO, Egypt – In a farewell message broadcast Monday on the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera, a man identified as one of the Sept. 11 hijackers said “It is time we kill the Americans in their heartland.”

It was the first broadcast of a farewell video attributed to a Sept. 11 hijacker. Another clip from a videotape the station said it recently received shows Osama bin Laden kneeling side by side with a top deputy who proclaimed the terror attacks a “great victory.”

It wasn’t clear when the tape was made but the appearance of an apparent hijacker in one segment indicated parts were filmed before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Al-Jazeera’s editor in chief, Ibrahim Hilal, identified the hijacker as Ahmed Ibrahim A. Alhaznawi – one of four hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. Hilal said the hourlong video, complete with narration and graphics, was delivered by hand to the station’s Qatar offices a week ago.

“I can’t tell you about when the material was made exactly, but it seems very recent,” Hilal said, noting the narrator at one point refers to the March 27-28 Arab League summit as coming up shortly.

A U.S. official, speaking in Washington on condition of anonymity, said the man in the tape is believed to be Alhaznawi.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the bin Laden material appeared to be outdated in the videotape he watched. Rumsfeld was not certain that the tape was shown was the same taped aired on Al-Jazeera on Monday.

“I was advised that what I was watching very likely was using a patchwork of clips from previous periods along with some dialogue of more recent periods,” Rumsfeld told a Pentagon briefing, qualifying his remarks as “very preliminary.”

Al-Jazeera, which has aired previous bin Laden statements, said it would broadcast the entire tape – which apparently includes old comments from bin Laden – on Thursday.

The London-based Arab newspaper Al Hayat published excerpts Monday from what it said was a statement from Mullah Mohammed Omar, the fugitive leader of the Taliban militia that provided safe haven to al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

According to Al Hayat, Omar expressed solidarity with the Palestinians in their confrontation with Israel and linked their plight to the U.S.-led war on terror, which some militant Muslims describe as a war on Islam.

The whereabouts of Omar, bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri and other top al-Qaida officials are unknown.

Asked whether he had drawn any fresh conclusions regarding bin Laden’s fate, Rumsfeld said: “I haven’t. I’ve not seen anything about his activities, any videotapes of him that are reasonably certain to have been in this year. Maybe they exist; he may exist, but I just don’t know it.”

On Monday, Al-Jazeera previewed several segments of its latest bin Laden video, including one in which bin Laden and al-Zawahri kneel side-by-side as al-Zawahri calls the terrorist attacks on America a “great victory.”

Al-Jazeera also aired a segment of a man, identified on the video as a Sept. 11 hijacker, speaking to the camera in a style similar to videotapes made by Palestinian suicide bombers before attacks.

Hilal, the Al-Jazeera editor, said the man in the video was Ahmed Ibrahim A. Alhaznawi – one of four hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

“The time of humiliation and subjugation is over. It is time we kill the Americans in their heartland, among their children, and next to their forces and intelligence,” the man identified as the hijacker said.

He wore military fatigues over a black shirt and a black-and-white checked Arab headdress. He sat before an image of towers surrounded in flames that could have been added to the background after the personal recording was made.

Al-Jazeera said the information on the tape indicated that the hijacker wrote and recorded his last will and testament in Kandahar, Afghanistan, six months before the Sept. 11 attacks. The station did not elaborate but said the tape was titled The Last Will and Testament “of the New York and Washington Battle Martyrs.” The title shot included photos of the 19 hijackers.

Al-Jazeera is a 24-hour station owned by Qatar’s government. The station has an independent editorial line but maintains a strongly pro-Arab position. It reaches more than 35 million Arabs, including 150,000 in the United States.

Since Sept. 11, the satellite station repeatedly has broadcast exclusive footage of bin Laden making statements.

Critics of Al-Jazeera, including some in the Bush administration, have called the coverage propagandist and inflammatory. The White House asked U.S. networks to refrain from airing the videotapes in full, fearing they might contain coded messages, and also asked the Qatari government to get Al-Jazeera to do the same.

On Dec. 27, Al-Jazeera aired a bin Laden videotape. Then too, it was not clear where or when the tape was made but bin Laden’s references indicated it could have been made around that time.

In January, CNN broadcast an interview with bin Laden that was done in late October. The interview was conducted by Al-Jazeera but the Arab network did not air the tape. That interview, done about a month before the Taliban and al-Qaida fled the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, shows a confident bin Laden, certain his forces would defeat the United States.

In mid-December, the Pentagon released a videotape of bin Laden that it said was found in a house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The tape had a date stamp that says it was made Nov. 9.

The U.S. government has at least one other unaired videotape of bin Laden, found by allied Afghan soldiers in Afghanistan. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday the tape shows bin Laden and a few others camping at night, suggesting bin Laden had forgone his large entourage in favor of a small group of supporters after Sept. 11.