Bin Laden Says He Has Nuclear Arms, Pakistani Reporter Claims

A Pakistani journalist claims that Saudi militant Osama bin Laden told him in an interview inside Afghanistan on Friday that “we have chemical and nuclear weapons.”

Journalist Hamid Mir, the pro-Taliban editor of the Urdu-language newspaper Ausaf, said he was blindfolded and taken to a site about a five-hour drive from Kabul, the Afghan capital, “where it was extremely cold and one could hear the sound of antiaircraft guns firing.”

In the interview, which Mir said he taped and which was accompanied by photographs, Bin Laden said he had listened to the speech by President Bush this week warning of attempts by Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network to obtain nuclear weapons.

“I heard the speech by American President Bush,” Bin Laden reportedly said. “He was scaring the European countries that Osama wanted to attack with weapons of mass destruction. I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent.”

According to the account, Bin Laden refused to answer the reporter’s next question, asking where he had obtained the weapons.

Contacted by The Times this morning in Islamabad, Mir said the interview took place in the early morning hours Friday. The interview, also published by the mainstream English-language newspaper Dawn in its editions today, was accompanied by a photograph of Mir with Bin Laden, a Kalashnikov assault rifle placed on the floor cushions between them.

Mir, whose newspaper has consistently supported the Taliban and portrayed Bin Laden in a sympathetic light, said he had no political agenda in doing the interview.

“I am just a reporter like you,” Mir said. “I am not a politician. I didn’t have the feeling that he is a hero, just a most-wanted man who would be a good story.”

Except for the brief exchange about nuclear and chemical weapons, most of the interview, featured as a “World Exclusive” under bold headlines on the front page of Dawn, contained much of the boilerplate rhetoric that has characterized previous Bin Laden interviews.

Once again, Bin Laden refused to take responsibility for planning the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, although he told Mir that the attacks were justified because of American policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq.