World’s most wanted man

Well, it's not like we hadn't worked it out for ourselves.

After a terribly hale and hearty Osama bin Laden - has he been holidaying at a Swiss health spa all these years? - decided to put his two cents in by video just before the United States presidential elections last month, it was obvious the guy wasn't even close to being dead.

And the most recent news suggests he isn't likely to be pushing up whatever fundamentalist Muslims push up anytime soon. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made it quite clear in reports published here yesterday that, as far as he's concerned, nobody knows where the al Qaeda leader is and anybody who says they do, is just guessing - or, I suspect, wants to get onside with Sheriff Dubya.

Of course we Antipodeans had already worked out that nobody in the West has a clue where the world's most wanted man is when it was reported locally that the FBI went searching for him in Fiji after some likely lads at a posh Auckland school sent them an email with this same hot tip.

Besides killing as many Westerners as it can, secrecy and invisibility is, of course, al Qaeda's stock-in-trade.

However, as the first part of three of the BBC documentary The Third World War (TV One, 8.30 tonight) explains, if Western intelligence agencies have failed to find bin Laden, they aren't entirely blinded to this movement's plans, even if they have never waged war against a group like it.

Al Qaeda: Hidden Enemy examines a pre-September 11 plot in Europe to explode a bomb in a busy square in the French city of Strasbourg.

Just before Christmas 2000, the German equivalent of the FBI, the BKA, discovered that four Arab men had arrived in Germany from other European cities carrying a cache of weapons and had set themselves up in a flat in Frankfurt.

The BKA had no idea what these men were up to, but the German equivalent of the SAS were sent in to raid the flat soon after, and uncovered not only guns but a collection of false documents, cloned credit cards, a recon video of the square in Strasbourg and - worst of all - chemicals for making bombs.

From here, the documentary traces the work done by intelligence agencies across Europe and Britain to identify these men, establish what organisations and movements they were aligned with and to finally discover that these four Algerians were one small unit in the worryingly wide network of terrorist cells linked to al Qaeda and bin Laden.

Most interesting of all, potentially, the BBC reporter who has made the series, Peter Taylor, interviews one of these men, the cell leader Salim Boukari, who is doing time in a German prison.

However the exchanges, in tonight's episode at least, aren't all that edifying:

"Are you a terrorist?" Taylor asks Boukari.

"I am not."

"What are you?"

"I'm a Mujad [holy warrior]."

The programme also has a proclivity for the melodramatic use of recreation, spooky music and Hollywood spy movie graphics.

However, Third World War should become more absorbing in parts two and three, which examine the search for the sleeper cells behind the September 11 attacks and the Indonesian fanatics behind the bombings of the two nightclubs in Bali.

Mr bin Laden will no doubt be watching it all from his hotel in Samoa.