bin Laden, Osama

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Saudi-born, Afghanistan-based, Islamic fundamentalist terrorist leader who has masterminded a number of terrorist attacks directed at US targets since the early 1990s. He promotes jihad (holy war) against the USA with the aim of liberating Islam's three holiest places – Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The 11 September 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, by suicide hijackers of two commercial airliners, and two other aircraft hijackings, claimed around 3,000 lives. It was the worst act of terrorism on record. US president George W Bush responded by launching a war on terror, with a US-led international coalition mounting military strikes on Afghanistan in an attempt to force its Taliban government to give bin Laden up. Earlier bin Laden was thought to have engineered attacks including the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in which 6 people died, the June 1996 bombing of the US military complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19, the August 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, and an October 2000 suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 US sailors. His al-Qaeda terrorist organization has also been linked to the October 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, and the July 2005 London transport bombings.

Bin Laden, who is on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list, is considered also to have financed the 1997 killing of 58 tourists in Luxor, Egypt, by the Egyptian fundamentalist Islamic Group, and attempts in 1999 and 2000 by fundamentalist groups from Afghanistan to infiltrate Chechnya and Dagestan, in Russia, and Uzbekistan, and Kurdistan, all Central Asia. In retaliation, the USA and United Nations (UN) imposed economic sanctions against the Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban militia. In May 2001, a New York State federal jury found four followers of bin Laden guilty of all charges arising from the 1998 US embassy bombings. The Taliban declared the convictions unfair, and reiterated their refusal to hand bin Laden over to the USA.

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