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Suspected Bin Laden Aide Says Egyptian Police Made Mistake
CAIRO, March 22 (IslamOnline) - A suspected associate of Osama bin Laden, arrested in Cairo on Thursday, denied links with the wanted fighter and said Egyptian police mistook him for someone else, security sources said.
The man told Egyptian police that he is a Yemeni mujahid (fighter) who was on his way to join the ranks of Chechan fighters battling Russian forces.
The sources said the man said he never lived in Egypt before as security forces here initially said. But prosecutors remanded him in custody for 15 days pending further investigations.
An Islamist lawyer had said Tuesday that the son of an Egyptian associate of bin Laden was arrested at Cairo airport. He said Mohammed Morsi Omar was taken into custody several days ago from Cairo's airport and taken to an undisclosed location while trying to enter Egypt with an Arab passport.
The lawyer, Muntasser al-Zayat, who defends members of the Jamaa Islamiya, the main activist group in Egypt, said the young man had no link to the activities of his father, Medhat Morsi Omar, also known as Abu Khabab.
The 21-year-old Omar "indeed used a foreign passport, after he tried in vain to obtain a passport from the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan," Zayat said.
Abu Khabab, apparently number three in bin Laden's organization, is suspected of organizing the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden harbor in Yemen last October. Seventeen sailors died in the attack.
But Abu Khabab is not mentioned in either the U.S. or Yemeni indictments, according to Yasser Serri, head of the London-based Islamic Observation Center, which seeks to defend the rights of Islamists around the world.
U.S. authorities have already charged bin Laden in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 220 people, and have long suspected his involvement in the Cole attack as well.
Despite a five-million-dollar price on his head, Bin Laden is currently living in Afghanistan under the protection of the ruling Taliban militia.
If convicted in Egypt, the young Omar faces life imprisonment for belonging to an outlawed clandestine organization that seeks to topple the secular regime of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
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