WASHINGTON, April 1: Former US president Bill Clinton said suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden was conspiring to kill him and was training hitmen for that purpose.

“And we know at the same time he was training people to kill me. Which was fair enough — I was trying to get him,” Clinton told Newsweek magazine in an interview due on newsstands Monday.

The Saudi-born radical is blamed for masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States as well as the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa.

Clinton said that in the fall of 2000, US intelligence had learned with a certain degree of accuracy where bin Laden would spend the night.

But he said he had opted against a military strike against that location to avoid civilian casualties.

“There were a very large number of women and children in that compound and it’s almost like he was daring me to kill them,” Clinton said.

The other option was to train commandos to go after him, the former president said.

But he argued the US military could not get close to Afghanistan “since we didn’t have any basing rights then, and we didn’t have anything like the international support that existed after September 11 for overthrowing the Taliban.”