'Bin Laden' Offers Truce With Europe

In a tape broadcast on a Arab television station, a speaker claiming to be Osama bin Laden offered a truce with Europe today and vowed to avenge the killing of the Hamas spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

It said that any state in Europe that stopped "attacking Muslims or interfering in their affairs" would be spared al-Qaida operations, but offered no such deal to the United States.

"President Bush and leaders in his sphere, big media institutions, and the United Nations ... all of them are a fatal danger to the world, and the Zionist lobby is their most dangerous and difficult member, and we insist, God willing, on continuing to fight them," the speaker said.

The Reuters news agency said that the authenticity of the tape could not be immediately proved but that the voice sounded like Bin Laden's.

If genuine, the tape - broadcast by Dubai-based Al Arabiya station - would give further proof that Bin Laden is alive and in touch with recent events. The voice on the tape referred the killing of Sheikh Yassin in an Israeli helicopter strike last month and the March 11 Madrid train bombs.

The Madrid bombings, which killed 191 people, were repayment for Spain's actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and "Palestine", it said.

Spain has troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

"What happened on September 11 and March 11 are your goods returned to you so that you know security is a necessity for all," the tape said.

The offer of a truce, or the withholding of future attacks, follows similar messages from the individuals blamed for the Madrid train bombings. The Spanish newspaper El País last week reported that a video discovered in the flat of the seven suspects who blew themselves up in the Madrid dormitory town of Leganes threatened further attacks in Spain if troops were not pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The purported Bin Laden tape said that the truce would last three months and could be extended, but that it would not begin until the "last soldier leaves our countries".

It said that the truce was to deny "the war mongers" further opportunities and because polls have shown that "most of the European peoples want reconciliation" with the Islamic world.

"They say that we kill for the sake of killing, but reality shows that they lie," the speaker said. Russians, he said, were only killed after attacking Afghanistan and Chechnya, Europeans after invading Iraq and Afghanistan and the Americans in New York after "supporting the Jews in Palestine and their invasion of the Arabian peninsula".

"Stop spilling our blood so we can stop spilling your blood," the tape added. "This is a difficult but easy equation."

The message said that US policy ignores the "real problem," which is "the occupation of all of Palestine". It denounced the US-led war in Iraq, saying it was making "billions of dollars" for companies, "whether those that make weapons or those that take part in reconstruction".