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Saturday November 7, 2009

Bin Laden videotape not new, monitoring site says

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A videotape of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden released on Friday is the Pashto-language version of a tape released several months ago, said IntelCenter, a U.S.-based terrorism monitoring firm.

The tape, titled "To Our People in Pakistan," was broadly released in Arabic and Urdu on July 12, IntelCenter said. Excerpts had been aired by the Al Jazeera television network on June 3, it added.

A video grab from an undated footage from the Internet shows Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a video that CNN said on July 14, 2007 was intercepted before it was to appear on radical Islamist Web sites. (REUTERS/REUTERS TV)

Earlier on Friday, IntelCenter had said al-Qaeda's as-Sahab Media had released a new video from bin Laden.

In his remarks broadcast by Al Jazeera in June, Saudi-born bin Laden said U.S. President Barack Obama had planted the seeds of "revenge and hatred" toward the United States in the Muslim world and warned Americans to prepare for the consequences.

In an audio message posted on an Islamist website in September, Osama warned Americans over their government's close ties with Israel.

Osama is believed to be hiding in the mountainous border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

More than 60 messages have been broadcast from bin Laden, his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri and their allies since al Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

(Editing by Paul Simao)

((Reporting by Mohammad Zargham; World Desk, Americas; +1 202 789 8015))

Copyright © 2008 Reuters

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