A video of two 9/11 hijackers, including the ring leader Mohammad Atta, reading their "martyrdom" will at Osama Bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan has emerged five years after Al-Qaeda's kamikaze attacks in the US, a leading British newspaper reported on Sunday.
It is the first time that a videotape of Atta has appeared, who flew an American airlines plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center - at a training camp in Afghanistan, The Sunday Times claimed.
The video, it said, fills in a significant gap in the timing of the build-up to the attacks on the United States.
Dates on the tape show that Atta was filmed on January 18, 2000 together with Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently stormed the flight deck.
The newspaper obtained a copy of the video "through a previously tested channel." The tape has no sound track and a US source said that lip readers had tried without success to decipher what was being said.
In the video, the duo was in high spirits, laughing and smiling in front of the camera. They appear relaxed, well groomed, and intelligent.
{{/usCountry}}In the video, the duo was in high spirits, laughing and smiling in front of the camera. They appear relaxed, well groomed, and intelligent.
{{/usCountry}}Only when Atta, with an AK-47 propped on a wall beside him, reads a document marked in Arabic "the will", does he become solemn. Both are well groomed without the haggard appearance of the identity mug shots issued after September 11.