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Bin Laden chased to 'one last base'
( 2001-12-12 10:23 ) (7 )

Afghan fighters cornered Osama bin Laden's troops in "one last base" on Tuesday as the United States honored those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks and charged a French Moroccan student pilot with being part of the deadly hijack plot.

In Washington, more details of a videotape of Osama bin Laden discussing the Sept. 11 attacks at a dinner emerged after a special screening for members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee. President George W. Bush is expected to release the tape on Wednesday.

Bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant accused by the United States of masterminding the deadly September attacks and long protected by the now routed Taliban, may be making a last stand with his followers.

US charges against Zacarias Moussaoui were the first aimed at an alleged key figure in the attacks on America that killed nearly 3,300 people. US Attorney General John Ashcroft said Moussaoui, held as a material witness since the attacks, had been indicted on six charges of conspiracy in carrying out the attacks. Four of the charges carry the death penalty.

In Afghanistan, tribal forces, aided by a rain of US bombs, said they pushed die-hard fighters from bin Laden's al Qaeda network into a final stronghold near Tora Bora in the east. "Bin Laden's supporters are now confined to one last base," said commander Mohammad Amin.

Amin and a spokesman for the US-led coalition both played down media reports that the fighters had offered to surrender by a Wednesday morning deadline set by their pursuers.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed concern that al Qaeda and Taliban leaders might flee into neighboring Pakistan from their besieged Tora Bora mountain cave and tunnel complex.

"It's a very complicated area to try to seal and there's just no way you can put a perfect cork in the bottle," he said, noting that US ally Pakistan was trying to shut its porous border.

Pakistan said neither bin Laden nor his followers would find sanctuary if they managed to slip across the remote border.

Ashcroft said Moussaoui, 33, was indicted by a grand jury on charges of "conspiring with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to murder thousands of innocent people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11."

Bin Laden and other leaders of his al Qaeda network were cited as unindicted co-conspirators in the 31-page indictment.

"Al Qaeda will now meet the justice it abhors and the judgment it fears," Ashcroft said.

Moussaoui will be tried in federal court in Virginia and not before a military tribunal outlined earlier by Bush. The charges said Moussaoui trained in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and received funds from sources in the Middle East and Germany.

Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota in August on immigration violations after he aroused suspicion by trying to buy time on a jumbo jet flight simulator.

US Senators who watched the latest bin Laden tape, found in Afghanistan, said it showed him recounting the Sept. 11 attacks in "casual, chatty conversation."

Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said bin Laden related how he heard about the first hijacked plane crashing into the World Trade Center on the radio at his mountain headquarters and urged those around him to wait because "there will be more."

Durbin and another US official said bin Laden mentioned Mohamed Atta, suspected of hijacking the first plane that struck the twin towers, as being the leader of the group. On the 40-minute homemade tape bin Laden also expressed amusement that some of the hijackers did not know they were on suicide missions, officials said.

"If there are any doubters left in the world, this tape is clear evidence of Osama bin Laden's guilt in the September 11 terrorism," Durbin said.

AMERICA MOURNS

Meanwhile, factional tensions rose in Kandahar and officials in Kabul insisted foreign peacekeepers should be held to 1,000 and have a very limited role.

But UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, in Kabul for the first time since the Taliban fled the city a month ago, rejected concerns over the size of the proposed force.

"The force ... will come as a friend, not as an enemy," Brahimi said. "So I think the issue of numbers is not going to be a problem and also what it does and does not do will be the subject of an agreement with the (Afghan) authorities."

The size and composition of the force have yet to be defined by the UN Security Council, which hopes to approve the peacekeeping troops and authorize deployment on Friday.

For the United States and its allies, 8:46 a.m. in New York (1346 GMT) on Dec. 11 was a time to look back to the attacks three months earlier that sparked the Afghan war to get bin Laden and overthrow his Taliban protectors.

At the same minute as the first of two planes struck New York's World Trade Center, crowds paid silent tribute to the dead as a crane hoisted a huge stars-and-stripes flag over the ruins.

Latest figures revised the death toll to 3,278 in New York, the Pentagon and on the fourth hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.

Commemorative events were held in more than 80 countries, and in space US and Russian astronauts stopped work on the orbiting International Space Station.

At the White House, Bush vowed the dead would never be forgotten. "We remember the cruelty of the murderers and the pain and anguish of the murdered. Every one of the innocents who died on September 11 was the most important person on Earth to somebody. Every death extinguished a world," he said.