Tuesday, September 04, 2007
 Indo-Asian News Service Sep 4: "Khartoum -- "Osama bin Laden could not have plotted the WTC attacks. Neither did Al Qaeda. It's all a myth created by the West," says Sheikh Hassan Abdallah al-Turbai, the charismatic Sudanese Islamist ideologue who hosted and mentored bin Laden in Khartoum in the early 1990s.
"He came here not to fight. He was building roads and airports and bridges in Sudan. He was a simple man. He could not have done it," Turabi said emphatically to a visiting IANS correspondent when asked whether he thought bin Laden was the key architect of the 9/11 bombings of the World Trade Centre (WTC) in New York that shook the world nearly six years ago. "Anyone who comes here is welcome. Yes, he was angry with the Americans and the British. But he is not the man behind Al Qaeda. Bin Laden comes from southern Saudi Arabia. He hasn't travelled a lot. He is alone," said Turabi, whose niece is married to bin Laden.
Turabi, labelled in the West as the "Black Pope of terrorism," took Osama under his wings after the latter was expelled from Saudi Arabia for protesting the presence of US troops on Saudi soil after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
According to the US 9/11 Commission Report, bin Laden found a haven in Sudan during 1991-1996, a period in which he built a nearly 800-km road from Khartoum to Port Sudan, perfected his jehadi methods and declared a fatwa against the American occupation of Islamic lands.
"He (Bin Laden) may have provided ideological inspiration. But he could not have done it. Every time you are branded as a terrorist, you awaken to your identity," said Turabi, dressed in the traditional Sudanese white robe gelabiya.
Bin Laden, the terror mastermind, was a myth invented by the Americans, said Turabi.
"After the collapse of communism, they were looking for a target. They found it in bin Laden. The devil is now everywhere. Bin Laden is a myth. It's like Che Guevara. It's an image," said Turabi, who speaks five languages and studied law in the University of London and later acquired a PhD from the Sorbonne.
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