DOHA (AFP) - Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden threatened the United States with attacks similar to September 11 and accused President George W. Bush of "misleading" the American people, in a video message aired just days before the US presidential election.
In the video, broadcast by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television Friday night, bin Laden told the American people that their security is not in the hands of either Bush or his challenger in the November 2 vote, John Kerry, but depends on US policy.
Bin Laden also accused Bush of negligence during the September 11, 2001 attacks in the message, which could further inflame the already intense final struggle between Bush and Kerry to win the White House.
"Despite the fact that we are into the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still misleading you and hiding the real reason from you, which means that the reasons to repeat what happened remain," said bin Laden.
"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or Al-Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any state which does not play havoc with our security would automatically ensure its own security," he added.
The tape showed a man resembling bin Laden standing at a pulpit in a white turban and beige cloak against a light background. Its authenticity or date of recording could not immediately be verified.
Bin Laden also accused Bush of negligence during the September 11 attacks in 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 people and were claimed by Al-Qaeda, saying he was slow to react to the first attack on the World Trade Center.
"We had agreed with (suicide hijacker) Mohammad Atta, God rest his soul, that he finishes all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice," bin Laden said.
"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the US armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone at a time when they were most in need of him," he said.
"He reckoned that it was more important to preoccupy himself with the talk of the little girl about her goat ... than with the planes and their strike on the skyscrapers, giving us three times the time required to carry out the operations, thanks be to God," bin Laden added.
The tape was the first appearance of the world`s most wanted man on video since September 10, 2003, when an undated tape, also broadcast by Al-Jazeera, showed bin Laden walking with his number two Ayman al-Zawahiri in a mountainous zone.
The last audio message said to be authentic by the US intelligence agency, the CIA, dates back to last April, when bin Laden proposed "peace" to European countries who agreed not to "aggress Muslims".
An unauthenticated message from bin Laden came in the form of a website message and audiotape broadcast on May 7 this year, when he pledged a reward to anyone who killed then US overseer of Iraq Paul Bremer or UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere along the mountainous 2,450 kilometer (1,500 mile) frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where conservative Pashtun tribes hostile to the United States are sympathetic to Islamic extremists.
He was last known to be in the Tora Bora mountains on the Afghan side of the border in December 2001, where US-led forces staged one of their final offensives in the campaign to topple the five-year Taliban regime.
Bush has made the US-led toppling of the Taliban and the capture of several of bin Laden close aides a key plank of his re-election campaign in the lead-up to the November polls.
10/29/2004 - 21:57 GMT - AFP