| GEO World | | CIA suicide bomber video released | Updated at: 0314 PST, Sunday, January 10, 2010
DUBAI: A Jordanian who blew himself up in Afghanistan, killing seven CIA agents and his Jordanian handler, said in a video broadcast on Saturday the act he was planning was for revenge.
"We tell our emir Baitullah Mehsud we will never forget his blood. It is up to us to avenge him in and outside America," Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi said about a Taliban leader killed in a US attack in August.
"This is a message to the enemies of the (Muslim) nation -- the CIA and Jordanian intelligence services," said the bearded man in military uniform, identified by a foreign television as Balawi.
A relative later confirmed to media in Jordan that the man shown in the video was indeed Balawi -- a Jordanian of Palestinian origin who moved with his family to Jordan after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
In the video Balawi is shown holding a weapon and sitting alongside another individual wearing an Afghan headscarf with a black banner bearing a Koranic verse in the background.
According to the monitoring group IntelCenter the man sitting next to Balawi is Hakimullah Mehsud, who succeeded Beitulah Mehsud as head of the Pakistan Taliban.
Balawi blew himself up at a US military base in Khost, near the Pakistani border on December 30, killing seven CIA agents and his Jordanian handler, a top intelligence officer and member of the royal family.
Jihadist websites have identified Balawi as a double agent who duped Western intelligence services for months before turning on his handlers.
But a senior Jordanian official told media on Wednesday that "Jordan has benefited since a year ago from anti-terrorist information provided by Humam Khalil al-Balawi and shared them with other (intelligence) services as part of the fight against terrorism.
Balawi, apparently referring to his claimed role as a double agent, said: "God's combattant never exposes his religion to blackmail and never renounces it, even if he is offered the sun in one hand and the moon in the other."
"We will never forget that he (Mehsud) said Sheikh Osama bin Laden was not on our soil (Pakistan) but that if he should come we would protect him," the man said.
"He kept his promise and paid for it with his life," he added about Mehsud, the Pakistan Taliban chief killed in US drone attacks last August.
media reported that the video shows Balawi training at a shooting range, but did not broadcast that part of the footage. |  |
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