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Pastimes : Terrorist Attacks -- NEWS UPDATES ONLY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mr.mark who wrote (301)	10/20/2001 4:55:43 PM
From: ~digs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 602

‘China paid Osama $10 m to study dud US cruise missiles’ by: John Hooper ; (Milan, October 20) China paid Osama bin Laden several million dollars for access to unexploded American cruise missiles left over from the US attack on his bases three years ago, a senior Al-Qaeda agent in Europe claimed. The alleged agent’s account is contained in the transcript of a secretly taped conversation between supporters of bin Laden obtained by The Guardian. His revelation emerged as President Bush yesterday announced that he had won Beijing's support for the war on Afghanistan. China denied that it obtained US missiles after the 1998 raid, which was carried out in reprisal for the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The US fired 75 missiles into Afghanistan during the attack on Bin Laden's camps on August 20, 1998. A report four months later in Pakistani newspaper Ausaf, cited Taliban sources as saying that 40 missiles were found unexploded. The story of what happened next was taken up by Lased ben Heni in a conversation with associates this year. Ben Heni, 32, a Libyan arrested in Munich last week, is accused of being the liaison officer between two terrorist cells owing allegiance to Al-Qaeda in Frankfurt and Milan. On March 9, in a rundown flat in the Milan suburb of Gallarate, he met the leader of the Italian cell, Sami ben Khemais Essid. Unknown to the two men, Italian anti-terrorist police had bugged the flat. The transcript says: “With these weapons, he (Bin Laden) has boosted his financial resources. From every part of the world, businessmen who hate Americans have come to study American missile strategy. “In particular, businessmen have come from China. Thanks to the money that comes from these studies from outside, he created the army of mujahideen headed by Omar Zayan in Chechnya”. Later, Ben Heni says, “When Bin Laden saw that the Afghan people, who were dying of hunger, passed missiles to She-ikh Messaoud, he bargained with the Chinese and sold missiles to them for an enormous sum — I think $10m — but only after the Sheikh had studied them”. The transcript is the first supporting evidence from inside Al-Qaeda of sporadic reports in the months following the 1998 attack that China had acquired two unexploded Tomahawk missiles. In March 1999, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman described the reports as “groundless”. hindustantimes.com