Bin Laden vows no US security in final tape: website

DUBAI (AFP) – Osama bin Laden warned in his final audio tape recorded before being killed by American commandos there will be no US security before the Palestinians live in security, an Islamist website reported Sunday.

Addressing US President Barack Obama, he said: “America will not be able to dream of security until we live in security in Palestine. It is unfair that you live in peace while our brothers in Gaza live in insecurity.”

“Accordingly, and with the will of God, our attacks will continue against you as long as your support for Israel continues,” he warned in a message posted on Shamikh1.net, a conduit for Al-Qaeda communications.

The founder of Al-Qaeda said he had tried to send a “message” to the United States through Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to explode a bomb on a Detroit-bound US airliner in December 2009.

“If it were possible to send you messages by way of words, we would not have had to use planes to send them to you,” he said.

“So the message we wanted to convey through the plane of our hero, the fighter Umar Farouk, may God be with him, confirms a previous message which had been sent to you by our heroes of September 11,” he said in a clear reference to the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States.

The audio recording lasting 1.02 minutes had no reference to the recent popular Arab uprising.

However, jihadists had said that the tape, made a week before bin Laden’s death, would have a message for the Arab Spring.

Another branch of the terror network, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), gave bin Laden credit for the popular Arab revolutions and asked followers to turn their “grief into action” against the West.

“Do not cry for him… Instead rise and go on his path… Rise and thwart the American Zionist Western unjust aggression with all of your power and energy,” the AQIM said in a statement.

“These events that are storming through the Arab region are only a fruit among the fruits of jihad in which the Sheikh (bin Laden) had a prominent role,” the AQIM said.

After an initial reluctance, Al-Qaeda on Friday confirmed the death of their leader and warned that those rejoicing his killing would have their “blood mixed with tears” and vowed the jihadist network would live on.

However, Obama, to whom bin Laden addressed his final message, has already swept aside the militants’ defiant reaction and pledged that the United States would crush what was left of the terror network.

“We have cut off their head and we will ultimately defeat them,” Obama said on Friday after meeting in private with the special forces personnel that raided bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan on Monday and killed him.

Three days after bin Laden’s killing, a US drone targeted a US-Yemeni cleric and terror suspect Anwar al-Awlaqi in Yemen, but the man narrowly escaped.

Thursday’s strike in Yemen’s Shabwa province, a stronghold of Al-Qaeda, is the first reported American targeting of other key figures in the terror network after a stealthy commando raid killed bin Laden.

It is not clear if Awlaqi was targeted following information the United States had said it gathered from bin Laden’s hideout near the Pakistan capital Islamabad.

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