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LONDON, Jan 17: Osama bin Laden is probably dead and his recent video broadcast looked like the farewell message of a doomed man, a former friend and journalist said on Thursday.
“I 99 percent believe he’s been killed in the caves of Afghanistan by the very hard bombing,” Essam Darez, an Egyptian freelance writer who spent time with Osama in Afghanistan between 1986 and 1990, said in an interview.
During four years as a photojournalist covering the Afghan mujahideen’s struggle against occupying Soviet troops, Darez said he got to know Osama intimately, sharing meals and spartan living quarters in his mountain hideouts.
Darez said a video broadcast late last month, of Osama delivering a rambling, improvised address in which he described the West’s “loathing” for Islam, could well be the last the world ever sees of him. “He looked like a sick man who felt he was going to die and that he must deliver this message before he did,” Darez said of Osama.
SUDAN TURNING POINT: Darez argued that, contrary to received wisdom, his all-consuming hatred of America was not sparked by US troops being stationed in his native Saudi Arabia.
The real turning point came in 1992 when Osama, having been kicked out of Saudi Arabia, arrived in Sudan.
“I tried to stop him going to Sudan and told him it was the wrong time and the wrong place and that he would end up as an enemy of his own country,” Deraz said. “Sudan made the big change in him. The people around him were very tough in Sudan and they pushed him to be leader of a new Islamic revolution,” he said.—Reuters
