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Osama warns US against executing 9/11 mastermind

March 25, 2010 19:02 IST

World's most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden on Thursday warned that the Al Qaeda will kill American soldiers if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is executed.

"The day America will take such a decision [to execute Khalid Mohamed and any others] it would have taken a decision to execute whoever we capture," bin Laden said in the latest audio record, broadcast on Al-Jazeera.

He also said that US President Barack Obama was "following the footsteps of his predecessor", a reference to former US president George W Bush. "The politicians in the White House were practicing injustice against us and still they are, especially by supporting Israel in its continuous occupation of Palestine," he said.

"They used to think that America across the oceans is protected from the rage of the oppressed until our reaction was loudly heard at your home on 9/11 with God's help," he said in the recording.

The Obama administration recently announced that it would try Khalid Mohammed and four other accused at a New York courthouse, a stone's throw away from where the World Trade Centre once stood.

Sheikh Mohammed and the other accused are detained at Guantanamo, as they await trial over the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed close to 3,000 people.

Osama bin Laden's last audio recording was released on January 24, earlier this year, in which he claimed responsibility for the attempted attack on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day. and vowed there would be further attacks on the US unless Obama took steps to resolves the Palestinian situation.

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