Nov 13, 2002 4 min read

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) – In an audiotaped message aired across the Arab world Tuesday, a voice purported to be that of Osama bin Laden praised terrorist strikes in Bali and Moscow in a message that clearly warned U.S. allies against following the United States in the war on terror. In Washington, a U.S. official said the voice sounds like Osama bin Laden, as the Bush administration tried to authenticate what would be the first hard evidence in a year that the al-Qaida leader was still alive.

In a rambling statement, the speaker on the tape broadcast on Al-Jazeera television refered to recent attacks, including the Oct. 12 Bali bombings “that killed the British and Australians,” the killing last month of a Marine in Kuwait, the bombing of a French oil tanker last month off Yemen and “Moscow’s latest operation, ” – a hostage-taking by Chechen rebels.

Speaking in a literary style of Arabic favored by bin Laden, he said the attacks were “undertaken by sons who are zealous in the defense of their religion,” and that they were “only a reaction in response to what (President) Bush, the pharaoh of the age, is doing by killing our sons in Iraq and what America’s ally Israel is doing, bombarding houses with women and old people and children inside with American planes.”

“Our people in Palestine are being killed, are being subjected to the worst kind of suffering for almost a century now,” the speaker said. “If we defend our people in Palestine the world is disturbed and allied against Muslims under the banner of combating terrorism.”

Al-Jazeera identified the speaker as Osama bin Laden and said they received the tape on Tuesday. The audiotape was aired alongside an old photograph of the al-Qaida leader but there was no new video of him.

The speaker then castigated U.S. allies that have joined the war against terrorism, specifically Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia.

After listing those countries, he warned: “If you don’t like looking at your dead…so remember our dead, including the children in Iraq.”

“What business do your governments have to ally themselves with the gang of criminality in the White House against Muslims? Don’t your governments know that the White House gang is the biggest serial killers in this age?”

In Washington, intelligence officials were evaluating the tape.

“It does sound like bin Laden’s voice,” said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ” We have to complete the technical analysis,” the official said.

American officials have not verified bin Laden’s whereabouts this year.

The last certain evidence bin Laden was alive was a videotape of him having dinner with some of his deputies, which is believed to have been filmed on Nov. 9, 2001.

Audio recordings are easier to make than videotapes which could reveal whether bin Laden is injured, has significantly altered his looks, or is in a vulnerable location that could be given away in a video appearance.

In September, the Al-Jazeera network aired voice recordings of bin Laden and top al-Qaida operatives. The CIA authenticated bin Laden’s voice then, but officials said the recordings probably weren’t made recently.

Those statements came out around the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the start of the war in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaida operatives thought to be alive because of their recent recordings include bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, and his spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith.

In the al-Zawahri recording, obtained by Associated Press Television News in early October, he spoke about Iraq, accused Washington of seeking to subjugate the Arab world on behalf of Israel – America’s strongest supporter in the region – and tried to assure followers that bin Laden was alive and well.

Experts say bin Laden’s al-Qaida network is on a renewed public relations campaign aimed at keeping itself in the public eye and associated with events, such as a possible war in Iraq, which could turn the Arab public against the United States.