TORONTO, March 5: A Canadian man who once lived side by side with Osama bin Laden, sensationally claims he later turned CIA double agent, and spied on Al Qaeda fighters in the US jail at Guantanamo Bay and in Bosnia.

In a tale that might have been torn from an espionage novel, Abdurahman Khadr told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation he also led CIA agents to Al Qaeda safehouses in Kabul months after the Sept 11 attacks in 2001.

Khadr, who lives in Toronto with his family, is the son of Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian, who was killed last October in Pakistan.

Khadr senior was fingered by Western intelligence services as an Al Qaeda operative and a leader of the network.

Abdurahman related his explosive story during a two-part interview with CBC.

Abdurahman Khadr was taken prisoner in Kabul in Nov 2001 as US forces hunted Taliban and Al Qaeda holdouts.

He said in the second part of the interview on Thursday that he agreed to work as a CIA agent to escape jail and travelled around the Afghan capital with US agents.

"There was this tour. They called it Abdurahman tour, I was famous for that," he told CBC.

"I took people from the CIA, the FBI, and the military. We'd go around in a car in Kabul and I'd show them the houses of Al Qaeda people, the guesthouses, the safe houses - the house they used (before Sept 11) and the houses they used after."

He said he was offered 3,000 dollars a month to work for the CIA, then told he would be taken to Guantanamo Bay to spy on inmates.

To protect his cover, Mr Khadr said he was treated like a normal prisoner, chained in a plane on the journey from Afghanistan, and kept in isolation for a month when he first arrived.

When the Guantanamo experiment failed, the CIA decided to send him to infiltrate Al Qaeda operatives in Bosnia, Mr Khadr said.

The US agents wanted him to volunteer to go to Iraq with militants mounting a resistance against the US occupation, but he declined, and was allowed to return to his family in Toronto on condition he did not reveal his CIA links.-AFP