Photos Show the inside of Usama Bin Laden’s Pre-9/11 Tora Bora Hideout [+video]

Newly surfaced photos of Usama bin Laden, taken in his Tora Bora hideout in the years before he launched the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history, and more than a decade before Navy SEALs killed him in his squalid Pakistan compound, show the Al Qaeda mastermind surrounded by guns, books and terrorist toadies.

The pictures were taken in 1996 by Palestinian journalist Abdel Barri Atwan, and introduced at a trial in Manhattan federal court of former Bin Laden deputy Khaled al-Fawwaz. Al-Fawwaz was convicted of conspiracy in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa and sentenced to life in prison.

The Saudi-born Bin Laden, who went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Russians, and hid there before and after the 9/11 attacks, lived in a primitive mountain home made of mud and stone. Photos show him smiling with fresh-faced cronies, seated amid massive shelves of books and grinning with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder.

Bin Laden had declared war on the United States and summoned Atwan, who was then-editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, an independent Arabic weekly published in London, to his hideout in an effort to get his jihadist message out to the world.

The photographs were found by Scotland Yard detectives in a search years later of al-Fawwaz’s London home. (Read more from “Photos from inside Usama’s Pre-9/11 Tora Bora Hideout” HERE)

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