'Bin Laden talked of thousands of US dead before 11 September'

Osama Bin Laden boasted to his followers that there would be "thousands of dead" in America about six months before the 11 September attacks, a witness at the trial of an alleged al-Qa'ida backer told a German court yesterday.

Shadi Abdalla, 25, a Jordanian who claimed to have served briefly as Bin Laden's bodyguard, said he had heard the al-Qa'ida leader make the remarks at a training camp in Afghanistan in May last year. "His words were very strong – we must strike America and destroy it. He said there would be thousands of dead," he told the court in Hamburg.

Mr Abdalla was testifying at the trial of Mounir al-Motassadeq, 28, a Moroccan charged with supporting the al-Qa'ida cell in Hamburg that helped carry out the attacks on New York and Washington. Mr Motassadeq's lawyers have denied he was involved.

"All the people in the camp knew that Bin Laden said there would be something done against America, but what he had in mind we did not know," Mr Abdalla told the court through an interpreter.Mr Abdalla said Mr Motassadeq, who was at the camp at the same time, had heard Bin Laden make speeches in which he had urged jihad, or holy war. "All the people there said the aggressors against Islamic lands should be killed," he told the court. When asked by judges who the aggressors were, Mr Abdalla replied: "The Americans, of course."

Mr Abdalla, a Palestinian born in Jordan, moved to Germany in the mid-1990s and was granted asylum. He was arrested in April on suspicion of plotting attacks on British, American and Israeli targets in Germany.

* Indonesia said yesterday it had linked the suspected field commander of last month's bomb attacks in Bali to the Islamic militant Jamaah Islamiya group. A lawyer for the suspect, Imam Samudra, said his client had confessed to a role in the bombing of a church on an island near Singapore.

Police said Samudra had admitted he knew Hambali, a Muslim preacher who has been identified by Malaysia and Singapore as a leader of Jamaah Islamiya and one of the group's main contacts with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network.