Bin Laden's bodyguard wants case out of NY court

New York: As one of Osama Bin Laden's former bodyguards Nasser al-Bahri reveals details about his employer's life in a new book, another bodyguard Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is trying to get a case against him thrown out of a New York Federal District Court.

Ghailani, who hails from Tanzania, has been charged with aiding Al Qaida in the bombings of two US Embassies in East Africa in 1998 that killed more than 200 people. He was captured in Pakistan in 2004 and was moved last year from Guantnamo to Manhattan to be tried in civilian court.

Ghailani has pleaded not guilty and demanded that his indictment be dismissed because of "outrageous government conduct," New York Times reported. He was detained for nearly five years in secret CIA prisons and later at the naval base at Guantnamo Bay in Cuba.

According to FBI transcripts of his interrogation, which has been made public, shows that Ghailani became the bodyguard of world's most wanted man after getting offer from a Bin Laden's intermediary. "Will you be my bodyguard? - was the question which came from Bin Laden... through an intermediary," New York Times reported quoting the declassified documents. Ghailani, immediately, did not said "yes", but replied that he would have to check with "the brothers at the training camp", the document said.

Two weeks later, when he did not respond, he was once again asked the same question. This time, Ghailani said "he did not have a good reason not to join them, and thus he became a bodyguard for Bin Laden," according to the FBI document. Ghailani was given an AK-47, and spoke to Bin Laden many times, the daily said quoting the FBI document, of which some parts were blacked out.

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While in that job, he encountered operatives who would later become 9/11 hijackers. After about a year, he became a forger and made false passports for Al-Qaida operatives who needed to travel. According to FBI, Ghailani claims to have become "very good with Photoshop".