WASHINGTON, May 11, (Agencies): Al-Qaeda’s supremo in Yemen — Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland — has warned Americans of a bloodier jihadist struggle to come following the terror mastermind’s killing by US commandos.
The warning from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula came as top US Senator John Kerry announced a trip to mend fences with a resentful Pakistan, where bin Laden was gunned down, but also to seek answers on how he came to be there.
Pakistan Wednesday saw the first possible violent reaction to bin Laden’s death, as drive-by attackers threw grenades at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Karachi, the country’s biggest city.
A local official said authorities were taking measures fearing a “big attack” to come.
AQAP leader Nasir al-Wahishi said in a statement posted on an Islamist website that the “ember of jihad (holy war) is brighter” following the May 2 killing of bin Laden, according to the SITE monitoring group.
The Yemen-based fugitive warned Americans not to fool themselves that the “matter will be over” with the killing of bin Laden, the Saudi-born architect of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.
“Do not think of the battle superficially... What is coming is greater and worse, and what is awaiting you is more intense and harmful,” Wahishi said, according to a SITE translation.
“We promise Allah that we will remain firm in the covenant and that we will continue the march, and that the death of the sheikh will only increase our persistence to fight the Jews and the Americans in order to take revenge.”
The United States has warned of the threat posed by Islamist militancy in Yemen, the homeland of bin Laden’s father, and has warned of the potential for the country to become a new staging ground for al-Qaeda.
AQAP was born of a January 2009 merger between the Saudi and Yemeni al-Qaeda branches. It claimed a failed attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound US airliner in December 2009 and was accused in October of sending parcel bombs addressed to US synagogues that were disguised inside computer printers.
Senator Kerry said that when he traveled to Pakistan early next week he hoped to resolve some of the puzzles lingering since the al-Qaeda leader was finally unearthed and shot dead by elite US Navy SEALs.
“There are some serious questions, obviously, there are some serious issues that we’ve just got to find a way to resolve together,” Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters.
But the Democratic ally of President Barack Obama also stressed the need to discuss the aftermath of bin Laden’s death “and how we get on the right track” with Pakistan. Islamabad welcomed the visit as an opportunity to ease mistrust.
There are mounting allegations that bin Laden evaded capture for years thanks to the complicity or the incompetence of Pakistan’s authorities, including its vaunted intelligence agency.
But Pakistan’s civilian government, while vowing a full investigation, has angrily dismissed the allegations and its powerful military has warned of unspecified reprisals if another unilateral US raid were to occur.
Pakistan opposition leader Nawaz Sharif rejected the internal military probe.
“We must get to the bottom of the issue. If not, then history will not forgive us,” he said, lashing out at the government and the military, and calling for an independent inquiry.
Meanwhile, Obama will deliver a speech reaching out to the Muslim world, in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden and amid ongoing unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Obama is preparing a wide-ranging address to be delivered as early as next week in which he’ll make the case that bin Laden’s death, paired with popular uprisings sweeping the region, underscores the US view that the al-Qaeda extremist group is a spent force in the Muslim world.
Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser at the White House, told the newspaper that the speech was likely to be delivered before Obama departs on a five-day trip to Europe on May 23 — not quite three weeks after bin Laden’s demise in a US commando raid in Pakistan.
“It’s an interesting coincidence of timing — that he is killed at the same time that you have a model emerging in the region of change that is completely the opposite of bin Laden’s model,” Rhodes told the newspaper.
Meanwhile, US agencies are likely using Interpol databases to research new information found in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Interpol’s secretary-general said Wednesday.
Ronald Noble said the huge cache of intelligence “has not been shared formally or officially with Interpol” but that does not mean it is not being actively investigated using Interpol information.
“You can do a main check, a fingerprint check, a DNA check, a phone number check, an email address check, without saying it is linked to bin Laden or anti-terrorism,” Noble told reporters on the opening day of Interpol’s European Regional Conference.
Noble said the United States is one of the most active users of Interpol’s databases, and that he expects they are already combing them for clues about past or planned terror activities.
In another development, President Asif Ali Zardari arrived in Moscow on Wednesday to strengthen Pakistan’s relationship with Russia on his first major foreign visit since the killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday will host Zardari at the Kremlin where officials were also expected to sign agreements on cooperation in agriculture, aviation and energy.
Moscow is not usually seen as an ally of Islamabad, not least because of its historically close ties to Pakistan’s traditional foe India.
Tensions also still linger over the Pakistani secret service’s backing of mujahedeen insurgents who fought against Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
But Pakistan is particularly keen to bolster its international alliances with big non-Western powers like Russia amid the boiling controversy with the United States over bin Laden’s death and domestic economic problems.
Zardari visited Kuwait at the weekend while Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is due to visit China next week.
The Kremlin hailed the death of bin Laden as a “serious success... in the war against international terrorism” but Pakistan has expressed fury that US forces carried out the raid without informing Islamabad first.
On Wednesday, Medvedev said bin Laden’s death could directly affect Russia, ordering officials to tighten up security at the country’s foreign embassies.