Bin Laden hid behind relief organization - report

January 23, 2000
Web posted at: 8:09 a.m. EST (1309 GMT)

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Federal prosecutors say Osama bin Laden used international companies and a relief organization as covers for what they describe as a worldwide terrorist conspiracy, The New York Times reported on Sunday.

Bin Laden, an exiled Saudi financier, is charged along with 16 others of conspiring to attack Americans in the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed more than 200 people and injured thousands.

In court papers obtained by the Times, U.S. prosecutors say bin Laden's organization obtained blank passports from the Sudanese government and recruited people living in the United States, communicating with them by fax, satellite phone and coded letters.

In one letter, according to the prosecutors, group members repeatedly referred to bin Laden by the code name "Mr. Sam" or "O'Sam" and called the group's members in Kenya "the fish people," the Times said. In 1997, after the FBI questioned a bin Laden associate in Texas, a warning went out that the man had been confronted by an "opposition company called Food and Beverage Industry, based in the U.S.," the court papers say.

The Times cited a portion of the alleged letter that said the man "has given an extensive interview." "Give my regards to Sam and tell him to take extra precautions cause business competition is very fierce," it added.

Bin Laden is said to be living in Afghanistan.

The Times said that federal prosecutors in New York had to reveal some of the evidence against bin Laden and his alleged associates after one of the defendants in the embassy bombings, Wadih el-Hage, sought bail, denying the government's claim that he was dangerous or likely to flee the country.

El-Hage was arrested in 1998 after Kenyan police and American investigators seized personal papers and a computer in a raid on his home in Nairobi.

The prosecutors claim that El-Hage, 39, a naturalised American citizen from Lebanon, is one of bin Laden's most trusted and dangerous aides. Until his arrest, he lived with his American wife and children in Arlington, Texas, a suburb of Dallas.

El-Hage, like the other defendants in the case, has pleaded not guilty. The Times quoted his lawyers as saying that he worked for bin Laden but only in legitimate businesses.

The Times reported that the documents taken from el-Hage's home in Nairobi depicted bin Laden as using a Kenyan charity, Mercy International Relief Agency, as a front for terrorist operations.

The paper said the prosecution's documents also appeared to link bin Laden's group to unspecified violence in Ethiopia.

The prosecutors contend that their documents contain a coded reference to the Taleban, the fundamentalist Islamic movement that governs Afghanistan, and information about bin Laden's network in the United States.

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