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A London-based Arabic newspaper says it has received an email it believes to be from Osama bin Laden.

The email to the Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper denounces Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's Middle East peace plan and praises Palestinian suicide attacks.

The style and the language of the statement closely resembles those used in previous statements by bin Laden.

"Prince Abdullah bin Abdel-Aziz's initiative, a Zionist-American (initiative) in Saudi government clothes, is merely a trick and a conspiracy," says bin Laden in the email.

The Saudi initiative offers "normal relations" and security for Israel if it returns Arab lands it occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Bin Laden also praised Palestinian suicide attacks on Israelis and urged Muslims to launch jihad, or holy struggle, against the Jewish state.

Sixteen Israelis were killed and more than 100 injured Wednesday when a Palestinian Islamic militant burst into a hotel dining room at the coastal resort of Netanya and blew himself up in the latest of such suicide attacks.

"The Jews try in vain to flee, finding no refuge and becoming exposed to exploding bodies that make them taste death and chased by horror," says the e-mail.

He describes suicide bombings in Israel and the September 11 attacks as "the great events" and "the blessed jihad".

Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel has aired a new videotape showing Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden's top deputy is shown claiming the September 11 attacks as a "great victory".

Al-Jazeera has showed a series of clips from what appears to be new videotapes from the al-Qaida network. In one, bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, kneel side-by-side.

An Al-Jazeera official says the tape was received a few days ago at its headquarters in Doha, Qatar. It is not clear when the tapes were made or how the station, known for airing bin Laden statements, received it.

Al-Jazeera also show a man identified as one of the September 11 hijackers speaking to the camera in a style similar to the video-tapes in which Palestinian suicide bombers deliver last testaments.

An Al-Jazeera subtitle identified the man only as Alghamdi. But the editor in chief of Al-Jazeera said the man in the video was Ahmed Ibrahim A Alhaznawi, a hijacker on board United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

"Those 19 brothers who went out and worked and sacrificed their lives for God, God granted this victory that we enjoy today," Zawahri said in the other tape.

"The great victory that was achieved was because of God's help and not because of our efficiency or cunning," Zawahri said.

American nuclear scientists have reportedly been ordered to produce a "bunker-busting" bomb designed to destroy the deepest underground hiding places.

Work is to begin next month on a missile which would dig up to 300ft into the earth before unleashing its nuclear payload.

The missile is part of a renewed nuclear research programme ordered by George W Bush which aims to produce weapons which could be used against non-nuclear countries to destroy their caches of chemical or biological weapons.

Researchers will begin trying to assemble the 5,000lb bomb using existing warheads and upgraded conventional bunker-busting missiles, USA Today reported.

The bomb would be used against the kind of deep cave complexes targeted by conventional weapons at Tora Bora in Afghanistan and which American intelligence believes Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been building to protect himself and his weapons of mass destruction.

It would be launched, probably from an aircraft, before using its specially designed hard tip and its rocket propulsion to dig down through the earth for up to 300ft before exploding with the power equivalent to 2,000 tonnes of high explosive.

The depth would mean the atomic explosion and its fallout should be limited to below ground, but shock waves would cause massive damage on the surface of the earth above it.

President Bush does not back the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty signed by his predecessor Bill Clinton, which has still to be ratified by the Senate.

Mr Bush has also appointed Stephen Younger, a scientist who advocates the use of "mini-nukes" on battlefields of the future, to the Pentagon office in charge of defending America from nuclear, chemical and biological attack.

Dr Younger was head of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos, the secret facility which made the first atom bombs, when he wrote: "It is often, but not universally thought, that nuclear weapons would be used only when the nation is in the gravest danger. This may not be true in the future."

The former public safety director at Boston's Logan Airport wrote a detailed memo last April warning of possible terrorist attacks.

Joseph Lawless said authorities had uncovered suspected terrorists with links to the airport.

The existence of the memo, dated April 27, has not been previously disclosed. Ten hijackers boarded the two planes at Logan which crashed into New York's World Trade Centre towers.

Mr Lawless said: "I wrote it because I was concerned about strong Boston connections to some of these terrorist organisations and because we had vulnerabilities that had to be addressed immediately."

The Boston Globe says the Massachusetts Port Authority had incorporated Mr Lawless's agenda into a review of the airport's security measures which had not been completed by September 11.

The memo mentioned the failed plan to bomb LA International Airport during millennium celebrations as evidence of an increasing threat of terrorism.

In the wake of September 11, Mr Lawless was demoted and replaced as public safety director. He is now head of security at the Port of Boston.

A spokesman for acting Governor Jane Swift said he wasn't aware anyone in the governor's office knew about the memo.

American authorities have deployed hundreds of sophisticated sensors across the country in a bid to foil any attempted nuclear attacks by al-Qaida terrorists.

Geiger counters and new hi-tech equipment have been distributed to customs officers and border guards as well as the country's embassies and foreign military bases.

Elite commandoes from Delta Force have been put on standby to seize any nuclear material which finds its way into the country, the Washington Post reported.

The move was revealed after it emerged a report from an intelligence operative says a Russian 10-kiloton nuclear bomb had fallen into al-Qaida's hands and its operatives were planning to smuggle it into New York.

The report, in October, was found to be unsubstantiated but only a handful of people were told of it to prevent widespread panic, Time magazine reported.

Fears of an attack by a nuclear weapon bought from Russian forces or by a so-called "dirty" bomb have mounted despite a failure to find evidence Osama bin Laden's terror group obtained such devices.

A search of al-Qaida camps and building in Afghanistan has found only crudely marked canisters which led American investigators to believe the terrorists had been duped by smugglers into being sold harmless hospital waste, thinking it was highly radioactive.

But American security services are so concerned at the possibility of nuclear or radioactive attack they have deployed equipment - called gamma ray and neutron flux devices - only given before to members of elite Nuclear Emergency Search Teams (Nest).

The Nest groups are scientists who are normally on standby to check claims by extortionists who say they have nuclear material, but have been reassigned to giving back-up to Delta Force.

A senior government official told the Washington Post: "Clearly the sense of urgency has gone up. The more you gather information, the more our concerns increased about al Qaida's focus on weapons of mass destruction of all kinds."

Reports are claiming Al-Qaida chief Mohammed Atta - who led the terrorist attacks on the US - visited Manhattan on September 10.

The New York Daily News says the FBI have evidence of his credit card transactions in Manhattan for that date.

The paper claims officials believe he was there to check the co-ordinates of the World Trade Centre.

It says investigators believe he plugged the co-ordinates into a sophisticated Global Positioning System.

The Daily News says they believe the hijackers were too inexperienced to handle the planes without help.

The paper's source says the unusual flight paths of American Airlines Flight 11 and

United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston shows the hijackers used the devices to guide them.

With the coordinates entered, the devices would have told the hijackers when they

The FBI believes Atta travelled to Boston on September 10 then drove to Portland, Maine.

On the morning of September 11, Atta and fellow hijacker Abdulaziz Alomari flew from Portland International Jetport to Boston's Logan Airport where they boarded American Airlines Flight 11.

The origin of the explosion is not clear, since there were no aircraft immediately overhead.

However, US planes had roared in the skies over the front lines north of the capital.

It is also not clear what positions have been hit by the blast and how extensive the damage is.

US jets bombed near the fronts north of Kabul and the key northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif overnight. The cities of Jalalabad in the east and Kandahar in the south also came under attack, according to Taliban and other reports.

Russian border guards in Tajikistan also reported fighting close to the border, with opposition forces using a tank to shell Taliban outposts near the village of Zardkamar.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's opposition has deployed hundreds of elite fighters near the front north of Kabul.

The appearance of some 800 to 1,000 elite troops near the front about 30 miles north of Kabul was the first tangible sign that the opposition was gearing up for a move on the capital, which the ruling Taliban seized in 1996.

Osama bin Laden's bid to obtain nuclear weapons failed repeatedly as his operatives were duped by black-market swindlers, it has been claimed.

American officials who have been analysing suspected radioactive substances in Afghanistan have found nothing to prove bin Laden acquired components of a nuclear weapon.

They also believe his operatives were ripped off by smugglers who sold them crude fakes which they claimed were nuclear materials, the New York Times reported.

A search of more than 110 buildings and terrorist camps in Afghanistan has found nothing more than crude containers hand-painted with skulls and crossbones. Some had apparently been dipped in medical waste to fool a Geiger counter but were clearly not dangerous, the investigators found.

A Pentagon official told the newspaper: "We did not find any type of serious radiological material. The stuff we found in Afghanistan was not the real stuff. They were swindled, like a lot of other people."

The most suspicious items found in Afghanistan were canisters discovered at the Taliban's agriculture ministry in Kabul and an al Qaida training camp near Kandahar, which were sent to the United States for testing. But the canisters did not have standard international radiation warning signs which would have indicated they were stolen or purchased from a nuclear facility.

"One just had a skull and crossbones painted on it by hand," said an American official. "It was a very primitive container. The people carrying it would have been exposed to radiation."

The discovery that al-Qaida was swindled by fake nuclear smugglers confirmed Pentagon research which showed that little of the black market in radioactive material was genuine.

An internal report showed that of almost 1,000 cases of alleged nuclear trafficking tracked since 1991 most were fake. The report said: "Most cases involve at least some degree of swindling, but small amounts of various genuine nuclear materials have been intercepted, including plutonium."

"All you need is a small amount of radioactive medical waste," an official said. "Pass a Geiger counter over it and you get a positive reading. You can sell it to an uneducated person as radiological."

The chance of more al Qaida attacks against US targets is "almost a certainty", claims American Vice President Dick Cheney.

US officials do not know when the attacks might occur or what the targets might be, Mr Cheney said.

He also said the United States could not have anticipated that terrorists would turn four commercial airliners into missiles on September 11, as he responded to criticism the Bush administration ignored warning signs about those attacks.

US officials are this spring evaluating a growing body of intelligence suggesting another large scale a- Qaida attack may be in the planning for Europe, the Middle East or the United States, say government officials.

"I think that the prospects of a future attack on the US are almost a certainty," Mr Cheney told Fox News Sunday.

"It could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week, it could happen next year, but they will keep trying. And we have to be prepared."

Asked if Osama bin Laden's network was planning to strike American targets, Mr Cheney said: "We assume they are. There is certainly a level of noise out there in the system that would indicate that those efforts are continuing."

"There's a great temptation ... for people to look back at September 11 and say, 'Well, we haven't been hit in eight months, therefore the threats have ceded or gone away.' I don't think that's the case at all," Mr Cheney said.

Some of the intelligence suggests al Qaida may be agitating for a large-scale terrorist operation but there is no credible evidence on the method, date or location, and some potential threats have been discounted as not credible, U.S. officials said.

Mr Cheney said the US government is doing everything in its power "to make us a tougher target."

A scientist claims the war in Afghanistan is partly to blame for the failure of the monsoon in parts of India.

The chief scientific officer at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences in New Delhi says large volumes of greenhouse gases have been released by US warplanes.

Murari Lal believes the war has contributed significantly to the global warming factors he says are behind the low rainfall.

He told the Press Trust of India: "The injection of large amount of greenhouse gases and aerosols over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Arabian Sea by US fighter planes during the Afghanistan war in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere contributed to significantly deficient rainfall over north-west and central India."