'Smoking gun' tape shows bin Laden exulting in attack

Although widely anticipated, the release yesterday of the Osama bin Laden "smoking gun" tape has sent a wave of shock and anger through the US.

In the amateur videotape, found in a home in Jalalabad, a laughing bin Laden is shown boasting that he and fellow al-Qaeda commanders had grossly underestimated how lethal the attack on September 11th would be. Politicians insisted immediately that the videotape, widely broadcast in full on network TV, provided absolute vindication of US claims of bin Laden's prior knowledge of September 11th and complicity, while members of the public expressed horror at the al-Qaeda leader's jovial demeanour as he described his reaction to the attacks.

The Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, asked how there could be any doubt about culpability after the tape and said it was "frightening and shocking to hear him invoke the name of an Almighty to defend murder". But President Bush "has known all along that Osama bin Laden was behind this", the White House spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, said.

"It came as no surprise to the President." On the tape bin Laden is shown saying " ... we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all." An engineer, who inherited millions from his family's construction fortune in Saudi Arabia, he said "( ... inaudible ... ) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only."

"This is all that we had hoped for," he said, according to a translation agreed by the Department of Defence's own and independent translators.

References to jihad, or holy war, and Allah run throughout the videotape, with bin Laden at one point expressing satisfaction that at one location in Holland "the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations were more than ... in the last 11 years."

Moments later he said: "This event made people think (about true Islam) which benefited Islam greatly." He also describes tuning in to a radio to hear initial reports of the attack, and admits that most of the hijackers did not know the full nature of their mission until they boarded the planes. "The brothers who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America, but they didn't know anything about the operation, not even one letter," bin Laden said.

The tape was released as American warplanes intensified bombing runs aimed at al-Quaeda members in mountainous regions of eastern Afghanistan. Afghan fighters launched a new assault against the fighters trapped in mountain canyons and caves after attempts to arrange a second surrender deal collapsed. Commanders of the eastern tribal alliance said they had dropped their plans for al-Qaeda fighters to turn themselves in at midday amid some reports that key terrorist leaders had fled to Pakistan, leaving their troops to face the full fury of the opposition.

But US officials insist they believe Osama bin Laden is still in situ. "We think he's in Afghanistan. We are chasing him. He is hiding. He does not want us to know where he is," the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, told a press briefing at the Pentagon.