In an interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes that aired Sunday, former FBI agent Ali Soufan told host Holly Williams that a personal letter that was seized during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, as well as newly recorded audio, reveals that his son, Hamza bin Laden, is committed to avenging the death of his father by leading the Islamic terror group al Qaeda to attack America and the West.
Soufan told Williams that Hamza, who would now be 28, wrote a letter that was collected in the raid and has since been declassified.
“He tells him that… he remembers ‘every look… every smile you gave me, every word you told me,’ ” Soufan said, describing the letter Hamza wrote when he was 22.
Hamza also reportedly wrote that, “I consider myself to be forged in steel. The path of jihad for the sake of God is what we live.”
Soufan told Williams that Hamza “was a poster kid for the al Qaeda… and for members of al Qaeda, who were indoctrinated with these propaganda videos, he means a lot to them.”
Soufan added that in audio recorded over the past two years, Hamza has threatened Americans that the terror group is going to attack and that “they’re going to feel it.”
“His recent message that came out, he delivered the speech as if it’s his father… using sentences, terminology that was used by Osama bin Laden,” Soufan told Williams.
“He’s basically saying, ‘American people, we’re coming and you’re going to feel it. And we’re going to take revenge for what you did to my father… Iraq… Afghanistan’… the whole thing was about vengeance,” Soufan continued.
In January, the State Department officially designated Hamza bin Laden as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) who is “actively engaged in terrorism.”
In a 2015 audio recording from al-Zawahiri, Hamza bin Laden can be heard calling for acts of terrorism in western capitals. In another audio message released by the terror group, the son of the man who orchestrated the September 11th, 2001 attacks on U.S soil threatened revenge on the United States and warned that Americans would be targeted both at home and abroad.
The State Department said that in 2015, Hamza bin Laden specifically called for “lone offender attacks against U.S., French and Israeli interests in Washington, D.C.; Paris, France; and Tel Aviv, Israel.”
In 2016, Hamza bin Laden “called on Saudi Arabian-based tribes to unite with al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to wage war against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
According to the State Department statement, the son of Osama was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1989. Hamza’s mother, Khairiah Sabar, was one of Osama bin Laden’s wives who was killed in the 2011 raid on the Abbotabad compound in Pakistan – the night 18 U.S. Navy SEALs captured and killed Osama bin Laden.
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