28 September 2001
The Ethiopian government has accused the Islamist group, Al-Ittihad Al-Islami, of having direct links with Osama bin Laden, widely held as the prime suspect in the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September.
The Ethiopian foreign ministry spokesman, Yemane Kidane, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that evidence had been collected when Ethiopia launched an attack against Al-Ittihad inside Somalia in 1997.
"We have documents and pictures of dead bodies of some Afghans and Arabs when we launched an attack against the Al-Ittihad Al-Islami group inside Somalia in 1997," Yemane was quoted as saying. Al-Ittihad is one of the groups named on the US Federal Bureau of Investigations' most wanted list, and is described by news agencies as a quasi-clandestine fundamentalist organisation formed in the early 1990s to set up a hardline Islamic state in Somalia.
Yemane charged that Al-Ittihad had also launched a series of military attacks on Ethiopia, as well as "plotting with other anti-Ethiopian elements to wreak havoc and achieve its goals under the barrel of the gun". The spokesman reiterated Ethiopia's readiness to join the fight against any terrorist group, and said it had been fighting Al-Ittihad since the mid-1990s.
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