Bin Ladens son threatens US

Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza is poised to lead a stronger, larger al-Qaeda and is “bent on avenging” his father’s death, according to a former FBI agent familiar with the personal letters seized in a dramatic US raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan’s Abbottabad.

Hamza, about 28 year old now, wrote those letters when he was 22 and had not seen his father bin Laden in several years. Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who was the bureau’s lead investigator of al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks, told media that the letters reveal Hamza to be a young man who adores his father and wants to carry on his murderous ideology.

The letters collected in the raid by helicopter-borne US Navy SEALs at a secure high-walled compound in Abbottabad, a garrison town north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, in May 2011 have now been declassified.

Only a handful of US military and senior officials around then US President Barack Obama knew of the raid that was reportedly in the planning for months. For a new episode of ’60 Minutes’ on the network, Mr Soufan described one of those letters from Hamza: “He tells him that…he remembers ‘every look…every smile you gave me, every word you told me.'”

Hamza also wrote this: “I consider myself to be forged in steel. The path of jihad for the sake of God is what we live.”