PARIS, May 24: Osama bin Laden said on Tuesday convicted Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui falsely confessed to being a Sept 11 plotter, according to an audio message, which the CIA termed authentic.

“I am responsible for assigning the roles of the 19 brothers to conduct these conquests and I did not order Zacarias to be with those on this mission,” said the speaker, who claimed to be the Al Qaeda leader.

“His confession that he was assigned to participate in those raids is a false confession,” said the recording released on the As-Sahab Internet site, frequently used by Al Qaeda.

“No intelligent person doubts (the confession) is a result of the pressure put upon him for the past four-and-a-half years,” the message continued.

Zacarias Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan origin, is the only man convicted in the United States over the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. A US court this month sentenced him to life imprisonment.

He told the court he would have piloted a jet into the White House on Sept 11, 2001, had he not been arrested beforehand. He later tried in vain to withdraw his guilty plea.

The speaker in the message, which was accompanied by a photograph of Osama, said the Sept 11 attackers were split in two groups: pilots and support teams to control the hijacked planes.

Moussaoui was learning how to fly so he could not have been the so-called 20th hijacker supposed to help control the airplanes, as Washington had claimed, the voice said.

“And if Moussaoui was studying aviation to become a pilot of one of the planes, then let him tell us the names of those assigned to help him control the plane.

“But he won’t be able to tell us their names, for a simple reason: that in fact they don’t exist.”

The voice on the tape recalled Moussaoui had been arrested two weeks before the attacks, and said that if he had been part of the plot then the other attackers would immediately have fled the United States.

In Washington, the CIA said the voice belonged to Osama bin Laden.

“Following a technical analysis of the tape, it is revealed the voice is indeed Osama bin Laden’s,” the CIA spokeswoman said.

But US analysts said Osama himself lacked credibility.

“If there is one person on Earth who has zero credibility in terms of testimonial evidence, it would be (Osama) bin Laden,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.

“Even if he was not a mass-murderer, these types of statements simply are not valuable as a source of evidence,” he said.

A US judge this month formally sentenced Moussaoui to life imprisonment without parole for his role in the Sept 11 conspiracy, after a jury rejected the death penalty.

According to the recording, Osama also said that the prisoners being held at the US base at GuantanamoBay, Cuba, ‘have no links with the events of Sept 11’.

The Al Qaeda leader’s previous broadcast statement was an audiotape released by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television network on April 23, in which he called on Muslim fighters to go to Sudan to wage war against ‘crusader thieves’. —AFP