So much for the alleged bin Laden connection in the US embassy bombings:
Saturday, August 29, 1998
MUSLIM FURY
"War of future" claims first victims
By CHRISTOPHER KREMMER, Herald Correspondent in
Islamabad
GENERAL Hamid Gul, a former chief of Pakistani intelligence, fastened his seatbelt as a Pakistan International Airways plane began its descent into Lahore this week.
smh.com.au
Excerpt:
In the Afghan capital, Kabul, the day after the attacks, an Italian military observer working with the United Nations, Lieutenant-Colonel Carmine Calo, died after an ambush by gunmen linked to the ruling Taliban Islamic movement.
Outside the Ugandan capital, Kampala, grenades and bombs exploded on three buses, killing 29 people. In the South African city of Cape Town, a bomb blast killed one person at a Planet Hollywood American theme restaurant, while in Tel Aviv, Israel, a bomb concealed in a rubbish bin near the city's main synagogue injured 19 people. In all three cases, police have not ruled out retaliation as the motive.
The "war of the future" described by the US Secretary of State, Dr Madeleine Albright, has already claimed its first victims. But the basis for the blood feud - the evidence provided by a key suspect in the Kenyan embassy bombing - is now being questioned.
Palestinian Mohammed Sadiq Odeh was arrested at Karachi airport the day after the embassy blasts, while travelling on a fake Yemeni passport. The photograph in the passport bore no relation to Odeh's appearance.
Under interrogation, Odeh confessed to helping plan the bombing, which he said was ordered by the exiled Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden. He also gave details linking bin Laden, who lives under the protection of the Taliban in Afghanistan, to some of the most notorious terrorist attacks of the decade, including bombings at US military targets in Saudi Arabia and an attempt on the life of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak.
General Gul, the former intelligence boss who knows something about false travel documents, believes Odeh is an imposter, planted by a foreign intelligence agency - probably Israel's Mossad or the US's Central Intelligence Agency - to provide a justification for the cruise-missile attacks on bin Laden's Afghan bases.
"It costs 1,000 rupees [about $30] to buy any passport officer at Karachi airport. Odeh's millionaire backer bin Laden hadn't given him that much money, nor even a reasonable forgery of a passport? This man wanted to be caught," says General Gul.
A leading defence analyst, Dr Shireen Mazari, agrees. "It just doesn't make sense. Hard-core political terrorists do not volunteer information the way Odeh has done. It's a set-up."
Odeh, and another suspect, Khalid Salim, were flown to New York on Thursday to face formal charges relating to the embassy bombing.
The stated aim of the US attacks was to destroy terrorist "infrastructure" being used to plan more major strikes against US interests around the world.
US officials with access to satellite photographs of the camps, near the eastern Afghan town of Khost, said the damage caused by scores of Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from warships cruising in the Arabian Sea was significant.
In the eight days since the strikes, the Afghan authorities have blocked efforts by journalists to visit Khost. They said only 27 people were killed at the Zhawar Kili al-Badr complex of camps. At least six of them were Pakistani citizens receiving weapons training to fight in the separatist war in Kashmir.
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