Bin Laden had bullet ready in case caught

Osama bin Laden

LOS ANGELES - Osama bin Laden has vowed never to be taken alive and once gave his bodyguard a pistol with two bullets to shoot him if it appeared that he might be caught, according to a new book of interviews with people who know the al Qaeda leader.

The book excerpted in the new issue of Vanity Fair, "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History" by CNN security expert Peter Bergen, also says bin Laden intensely dislikes deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

After the 2001 attacks on the United States carried out by al Qaeda the Bush administration made much of what it said were links between Saddam and bin Laden's organisation, citing this as one justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Bush said in a speech in October 2002 that "we've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."

Bin Laden's Pakistani biographer, Hamid Mir, told Bergen that when he interviewed bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader "condemned Saddam Hussein ... He gave such kind of abuses that it was very difficult for me to write," he said.

In an interview with Bergen, bin Laden's former chief bodyguard said, "Sheikh Osama gave me a pistol and made me his personal bodyguard. The pistol had only two bullets, for me to kill Shiekh Osama with in case we were surrounded or he was about to fall into the enemy's hands, so that he would not be caught alive." Bergen, who met bin Laden in 1997, interviewed more than 50 people over eight years to produce the book which will be published next month.

In the Vanity Fair excerpt, Bergen said that contrary to claims from the Bush administration, bin Laden was in the mountainous eastern Afghanistan region of Tora Bora after the fall of the Taleban, in 2001.

Reports at the time said US-backed Afghan forces scoured the area in a vain bid to catch bin Laden and his top lieutenants, although there has never been any US confirmation that he was definitely there.

Abu Jaafar al-Kuwaiti, an eyewitness, posted an account about the morning of Dec. 10, 2001, on al-Qaeda's main website, writing: "We received the horrifying news! The trench of Sheikh Osama had been destroyed; the trench where Sheikh used to come out every day to check the moujahedeen situation and follow the news of the battle. God kept Osama bin Laden alive, because he left the bunker only two nights to an area only 200m away."

The United States is still trying to catch bin Laden, who US officials say they believe to be still somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

- REUTERS