New bin Laden video shows 9/11 hijacker

A new Osama bin Laden videotape released today on the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks shows one of the suicide hijackers speaking his last will and testament into the camera as his image is superimposed upon an image of a burning World Trade Centre.

The videotape had not yet been posted on extremist websites. But the IntelCenter, a US monitoring group in Washington, said it had obtained the videotape and provided it to Associated Press Television News.

The video began with a still photo of bin Laden in front of a brown backdrop. The terror leader, in a voice-over, is heard saying: "This talk of mine consists of some reflections on the will of a young man who personally penetrated the most extreme degrees of danger and is a rarity among men: one of the 19 champions (may Allah have mercy on them all)."

Then, the videotape of the September 11 hijacker, Waleed al-Shehri appears. Al-Shehri was one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the World Trade Centre.

"We shall come at you from your front and back, your right and left," al-Shehri said in the tape, asserting that America would suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union.

In the tape, al-Shehri also praised the losses the United States suffered in Somalia in the late 1990s.

"As for our own fortune, it is not in this world," he said. "And we are not competing with you for this world, because it does not equal in Allah's eyes the wing of a mosquito."