CAIRO, Dec 14: The videotape the United States claims proves that Osama bin Laden was behind the Sept 11 attacks has failed to convince the Muslim world.

Muslims from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean branded the tape a fake.

Many dismissed the videotape as yet another US ploy to sully Osama’s name and detract attention from Washington’s unquestioning support for Israel.

In Egypt some are even talking of a “Hollywood farce”.

The United States “has the technology to forge a videotape of this kind,” said Abdullah Omar Abdel Rahman, whose brother was seized last month in Afghanistan as a suspected leader of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.

“In openly admitting his involvement, bin Laden is contradicting himself, as he has always blessed attacks, but has never explicitly claimed them.”

His brother, Ahmed Omar, was captured by the Northern Alliance last month. His father is Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind religious leader sentenced to life in prison in 1995 for a foiled plot to bomb several New York landmarks.

Egyptian television broadcast extracts of the tape late Thursday following its release by the Pentagon, while newspapers gave it only a brief mention in their Friday editions without comment.

“I strongly doubt that the Americans found it as they claim in one of the caves of Afghanistan. It’s illogical,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

“At the moment of flight, the first instinct is to destroy incriminating evidence, so they (bin Laden’s men) would have burned it.”

On the streets of Cairo, where the destruction of the World Trade Center that killed more than 3,000 is regarded as a metaphor for the “collapse of American arrogance” towards Arabs, many doubted that the tape was genuine.

“It’s a Hollywood farce. They have studios which can simulate earthquakes and all sorts of special effects so nothing would stop them from finding a bin Laden double,” charged advertising agent Munir Salem.

“If they can make a film with an actor shaking the hand of the American president, what prevents them from using such special effects to fake a video. Even the inaudible parts were done deliberately to give it an authentic flavour,” said architect Hend al-Alfi.

“The Americans lie as easily as they breathe. They had promised a Palestinian state and now they bless Israel’s destruction of Palestinian land, so to fabricate a cassette is nothing,” said Amr Abdel Mohsen, political science student at the University of Cairo.

Muntasser al-Zayyat, foremost defence lawyer for Egyptian militants, pounced on the tape to accuse the United States of launching an onslaught on Afghanistan without proof of Osama’s responsibility.

The tape “shows that the United States had no evidence whatsoever when it blamed bin Laden hours after the Sept 11 attacks and when it launched its air raids on Afghanistan (on Oct 7), killing people and destroying homes,” he said.

INDONESIA: Doubts over the videotape were expressed by both moderate and hardline groups in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.