Tuesday January 22, 2008

US President George W Bush should sit down for peace talks with Osama bin Laden, the terror chief’s son said today.

Omar bin Laden insisted his father – wanted for the 9/11 New York terror attacks – was not a terrorist.

And he said he wanted the bin Laden name to be a byword for peace.

He said: “They [need to] do some meeting and talk together.

“Find the middle ground between everybody – that’s my goal, to find it for every civilian people.”

But he admitted it might be tricky for US authorities to find the world’s most wanted man – as he is virtually untraceable.

He added: “He doesn’t have e-mail.

“He doesn’t take a telephone – if he had something like this, they will find him through satellites.

“My father thinks he will be good for defending the Arab people and stop anyone from hurting the Arab or Muslim people any place in the world.”

He added: “My father is asking for a truce, but I don’t think there is any government [that] respects him.

“At the same time they do not respect him, why everywhere in the world, they want to fight him? There is a contradiction.”

Osama bin Laden, believed to be in hiding in the Pakistan-Afghan border region, offered a truce to Europe in a 2004 audiotape and a conditional truce to the United States in a 2006 message.

In November, he called on European nations to pull out of Afghanistan in a message seen by some experts as an effort to reach out to Europe.

But since then he has also been calling for Muslims to rally around jihad, or “holy war,” encouraging fighters in Iraq in particular to continue their battles with US and Iraqi forces.

Omar bin Laden’s British wife of one year – formerly Jane Felix-Browne, but who now goes by the name of Zaina Alsabah – compared the world’s most wanted man to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

Speaking from Cairo via satellite, he told US television’s The Today Show: “Gerry Adams was classed as a terrorist.

“The IRA killed an awful lot of people. Yet, they talked. They sat down at a table and now Gerry Adams is an MP. Why can’t we get something like that with Osama?”

Omar bin Laden, 26, said he last spoke to his father eight years ago, when he left an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan to pursue a career in business, in his native Saudi Arabia.

Trained at al-Qaida camp, Omar, the fourth eldest of Osama bin Laden’s 19 children, lived with his father in Sudan, then moved with him to Afghanistan when Khartoum forced out the al-Qaida leader in 1996.

Zaina, 52, added: “There’s not going to be any peace unless people talk.

“Peace isn’t going to come with bombs. Peace isn’t going to come with fighting. “To arrest Osama, it’s not going to solve anything.

“You take Osama bin Laden away, and what are you going to get? You might get something a hell of a lot worse. That’s what we’re afraid of.”

Omar bin Laden added in halting English: “The world has chance now to find [a] new solution, to find [a] new chance for peace because still my father [is] alive.

“If my father die[s], there will be a lot of people say[ing], ‘Now I am head of al-Qaida.’

“You will find thousands of al-Qaida everywhere.”

He also said he is speaking out in a bid to stop the killing of innocent civilians caught up in the so-called war on terror.

Wearing a black, leather biker jacket, black polo shirt and faded blue jeans and with his long hair pulled back in tightly braided dreadlocks, he said: “[It's] not for my father, not for President Bush, just for civilian people dying every day, some in Palestine, some in Iraq, some in Afghanistan. “Why, why, why should civilian people die?”

He has previously told how he plans to organize a 3,000-mile horse race across North Africa to draw attention to the cause of peace.

He said last week: “It’s about changing the ideas of the Western mind. A lot of people think Arabs – especially the Bin Ladens, especially the sons of Osama – are all terrorists.

“This is not the truth.”

Omar bin Laden currently runs a contracting company in Saudi Arabia connected with the Binladen Group, and he spends much of his time in Egypt.

It was during a desert horseback ride at the Pyramids of Giza that he met his wife.

Alsabah, who has married five times, and has five grandchildren, has applied for a visa to live in the UK with her husband.