'Bin Laden' Tape Says Tv Journalists Have No Al-qaida Links

A new tape recording purportedly from Osama bin Laden claims that two al-Jazeera journalists who have been imprisoned have nothing to do with al-Qaida.

The speaker on the audio tape said journalists Sami al-Hajj and Tayssir Alouni had no links to his operations.

Cameraman al-Hajj was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 and is being held at the notorious US military base in Cuba, Guantánamo Bay, accused of having links to the terrorist group.

Tayssir Alouni, a correspondent for the Arabic satellite news channel, was convicted by a Spanish court in September 2005 of collaborating with al-Jazeera, although he and the channel denied the charges.

The tape mentioned by name the two journalists and an aid worker, Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, who founded an Afghan charity that was accused by the US as supporting terrorism, saying none of them was linked to al-Qaida.

It also said neither Zacarias Moussaoui - the only person convicted in the US for the September 11 attacks - nor anyone held at Guantánamo had anything to do with the group.

Earlier this year the Paris-based international media watchdog, Reporters Sans Frontières, called on the US to free al-Hajj and another journalist incarcerated at Guantánamo, saying they had been unfairly detained.

The authenticity of the bin Laden tape, which was posted on a website often used by al-Qaida, has not been verified.

Two US counterterrorism officials told Associated Press that US intelligence was aware of the bin Laden message. One said there was no reason to doubt its authenticity.

The audio message, which is less than five minutes long, was transmitted with a still photo of bin Laden and is the third missive purported to have come from the al-Qaida leader this year.

His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, releases messages more frequently, appearing in videotapes, while bin Laden has not appeared in a video since October 2004.