Bin Laden ‘warned his mother of terror strikes’
Suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden told his mother there was ‘‘big news’’ on the way, two days before the September 11 terror strikes, it was reported tonight.
An unnamed foreign intelligence agency reportedly intercepted a call in which bin Laden said: ‘‘In two days you are going to hear big news, and you are not going to hear from me for a while.’’
The call was made to Al-Kalifa bin Laden, who is his either his mother or adoptive mother, a wife of his father who may have raised him after his birth mother died.
But because of his father’s multiple wives, confusion surrounds her exact status, and some reports claimed she is his birth mother.
The intercepted call to the one member of his family bin Laden has stayed close to came two days before the attack, the New York Times and broadcaster NBC reported.
Bin Laden, the millionaire son of a Saudi Arabian construction magnate, was disowned by most of his relatives, including at least 50 brothers, after beginning his terrorist campaign.
The clan is one of Saudi Arabia’s richest, with close links to the Saudi royal family.
Al-Kalifa bin Laden is known to have an apartment in Paris and was in the city a day after the attacks for treatment at the American Hospital, an exclusive private clinic.
She is reported to have kept in close contact with bin Laden and attended his son’s wedding in Afghanistan earlier this year.
The 19-year-old married one of the daughters of Mullah Mohamed Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban movement, which offered bin Laden a home when he fled Sudan in the wake of American air strikes targeting his bases there.
The phone interception is the first known to have been made since 1999, when bin Laden abandoned telephone communications, knowing American eavesdroppers were listening.
Until then, he had spoken regularly on a satellite phone that was part of a marine communications network, and which was used to pinpoint his location in 1998, when then President Bill Clinton launched Cruise missile attacks on training camps in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden was believed to have abandoned phones, faxes and computers in favour of sending messages through his followers.
But a Washington official told the New York Post that intelligence had had ‘‘a fix’’ on where bin Laden was before the September 11 strikes.
It was lost when he moved and Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have both admitted America does not now know where he is.
