Video Shows Bin Laden Meeting With 9/11 Planners
E-MailPrint Reprints Save
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
Published: September 7, 2006
The Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera showed today what it said was a videotape that had not been broadcast before of Osama bin Laden and some of the planners of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Skip to next paragraph
Hostilities in the Mideast
Go to Complete Coverage »
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who the United States says was the paymaster for the attacks, is shown speaking on the tape, which was broadcast just days ahead of the fifth anniversary of the hijackings. The tape shows hooded men practicing martial arts kicks in what appeared to be the courtyard of a house or building, wrestling over a handgun, and others hiking down a rugged mountainside.
The tape, a composite of scenes, showed Osama bin Laden walking in the midst of a group of men in long robes and headdresses who were perhaps members of Al Qaeda.
It also showed two men that Al Jazeera said were Wael al-Shahri and Hamza al-Ghamdi, among the 19 hijackers identified after the attacks.
On its Web site, the satellite channel said that the tape showed the period when the planning of the attacks was taking place. Al Jazeera did not say how it obtained the tape.
Mr. Bin Laden did not speak in the tape. The last time Al Jazeera broadcast a message from him was in December 2004, when he called for Muslims to boycott elections in Iraq and endorsed the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as his deputy there.
Mr. Zarqawi was killed by an American airstrike in Iraq in June.
After the 2004 audiotape was broadcast, President Bush quickly took the unusual step of responding, saying that Mr. bin Laden’s message ’’make the stakes” of the Iraqi election “pretty clear to me.’’
Soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mr. Bush said that he wanted Mr. bin Laden ’’dead or alive,’’ but since then has usually avoided mentioning him.
On Wednesday, however, Mr. Bush referred to Mr. bin Laden repeatedly in a speech in which he said he wanted to put the terror suspects captured after Sept. 11 on trial. |
