Web site says it will show new bin Laden video

DUBAI, Sep 7 (Reuters) An Islamist Web site said today it would soon show a new video of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to mark the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

The Web site published a still photograph apparently from the video, which showed bin Laden looking older than in previously available pictures.

The site did not say when the video, produced by al Qaeda's media arm al-Sahab, would be issued, but Al Jazeera television quoted media sources in the United States as saying it was likely to be released within 72 hours.

Bin Laden was last seen in a video statement aired to coincide with the November 2004 U.S. presidential election. Since then, he has issued several audio messages, the last in July 2006 in which he vowed al Qaeda would fight the United States anywhere in the world.

White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe, accompanying President George W. Bush at an Asia-Pacific leaders' summit in Sydney, said in reaction to the report: ''Six years after 9/11, the arrests in Germany and Denmark this week, and the battles we fight against al Qaeda in Iraq, Afghanistan ... remind us of the continuing threat we face from extremists and why we must continue to take the fight to them wherever they are.'' Germany on Wednesday foiled a plot by Islamist militants to attack US installations there and arrested three suspects believed to be members of an al Qaeda-affiliated group.

The previous day, Danish police arrested eight young Muslims on suspicion of plotting a bomb attack and having links with al Qaeda.

US-led forces have been searching for bin Laden since they toppled Afghanistan's Taliban government after it refused to hand over the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri are believed to be hiding in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a region that US intelligence has described as safe haven for al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In July, CNN reported that radical Islamist Web sites had proclaimed there would be ''good news soon from Sheikh Osama bin Laden''.

The US Senate voted two months ago to double the bounty on bin Laden to million.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said he wanted bin Laden caught dead or alive. But the president later shifted his emphasis, saying he did not know where bin Laden was.

REUTERS ARB PM1435