Mr Osama bin Laden tried in the 1990s to buy uranium, possibly to make a weapon, a defector from his militant Islamic group testified yesterday in the trial of four men accused in the bombings of two US embassies in Africa.
Mr Jamal Ahmed al Fadl said he had served as the intermediary in the transaction between Mr bin Laden, then in Sudan, and a seller he identified only as "Bashir", who demanded $1.5 million for a cylinder of uranium about one metre long.
Mr Al Fadl said he did not know if Mr bin Laden successfully completed the purchase.
Prosecutors have called the 34-year-old Sudanese national, who defected from Mr bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation and sought protection from the US government, to help bolster their case that Mr bin Laden masterminded the near-simultaneous 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which left 224 people dead, 12 of them Americans.
US authorities have expressed numerous concerns over the past few years that a radical group was trying to obtain material to build a nuclear bomb. Mr Al Fadl's testimony offered details of the effort by Mr bin Laden, a sworn enemy of the United States.
Mr Al Fadl said he was assigned to the effort by an alQaeda leader known by the pseudonym Abu Fadl al Makkee, while the organisation was based in Khartoum from 1991 to 1996. He said he did not remember the exact date.
"Al Makkee told me: `People in Khartoum have uranium. We need to buy that,' " Mr al Fadl said. At a meeting in Bait al Man, a city north of Khartoum, al Fadl was able to examine the merchandise, he said.
"There were documents about the origin of it: South Africa, serial numbers and things about quality," Mr al Fadl said. "The machine to test the cylinder would come from Kenya."
It was during the period al-Qaeda was in Sudan that Mr Al Fadl, a slightly-built man with a closely-cropped beard, left the group and offered to provide US authorities with information. His testimony is expected to last until today. The four suspects on trial in New York since Monday have pleaded innocent.
Reuters adds: Mr bin Laden is the most immediate and serious threat to America's national security, the CIA chief, Mr George Tenet, said yesterday. In a wide-ranging annual report on threats to US security, Mr Tenet also highlighted the explosion in information technology and the exploitation of the Internet by extremist groups such as Mr bin Laden's network. Mr Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was testifying on his report to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
He focused on Russia, China and North Korea as the main suppliers of missile technology and equipment for making weapons of mass destruction to other countries, particularly to South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.