US intensifies efforts to get Osama



By Our Correspondent

Dawn
NEW YORK, Jan 24: The United States has stepped up its efforts to get Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile now living in Afghanistan, by filing court documents to corroborate its assertions that Mr Laden directed a worldwide "terrorism" conspiracy against the Americans.

Last week US Assistant Secretary of State, Karl Inderfurth met with Taliban officials at Pakistan-Afghan border in a bid to persuade them to either expel their number one enemy or hand him over. The Taliban asked for more proof from the American officials linking Laden to the terror plots and blowing up of US embassies in East Africa.

According to a front page report in the Sunday New York Times the court papers filed by the US prosecutors in the case depict an organization (al Qaeda) that used international companies and a relief organization as cover for its operations; obtained blank passports from the government of Sudan; recruited a network of people living in the United States; and communicated by fax, satellite phone and coded letters, often using not-so-veiled language.

"In one letter between group members, for instance, prosecutors say Mr Laden was repeatedly referred to by the code name "Mr. Sam" or "O'Sam," and the group's members in Kenya were called "the fish people."

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned one Laden associate in Texas in 1997, a letter went out warning that the man had been confronted by an "opposition company called Food and Beverage Industry, based in the US." This, prosecutors said, was a reference to the F.B.I.

"He has given an extensive interview," the letter read. "Give my regards to Sam and tell him to take extra precautions because business competition is very fierce," the paper said.

The NYT report goes into detail about the relationship between Wadih Al Hage, a naturalized American citizens who was arrested in 1998, in Texas a year after the Kenyan police, accompanied by American investigators, raided his Nairobi home and seized his personal papers and computer. American authorities tied him to the terrorist conspiracy, and he has been held without bail ever since under stringent restrictions. He has been barred from talking or writing to virtually anyone but his immediate family and lawyers.

"Responding to pleas from Mr el- Hage's lawyers for bail, prosecutors disclosed evidence that they say shows he was one of Mr Laden's most trusted and dangerous aides, privy to his secrets and a personal courier of his instructions.

They say Mr el-Hage met with Mr Laden in Afghanistan in 1997, and took orders to his operatives in Kenya to "militarize" for the first time.

The documents also show that Mr Laden used a Kenyan charity, Mercy International Relief Agency, as a front for terrorist operations, the prosecutors claim.

Separately, prosecutors suggested that Mr el-Hage worked closely with a Muslim religious figure in Texas, who has not been charged in the case but who they say helped Mr Laden buy a jet after he had moved his operations to Sudan in 1991," the paper said.