Swiss institute concludes latest bin Laden tape is not authentic, French report says

Friday, November 29th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

PARIS (AP) _ The latest audiotape statement attributed to Osama bin Laden is not authentic, according to a report by a Swiss research institute aired on French television late Thursday.

The Lausanne, Switzerland-based Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, IDIAP, said it was 95 percent certain the tape does not feature the voice of the long-absent terrorist leader.

The review of the tape was commissioned by France-2 television and its findings were presented by the institute's director, Professor Herve Bourlard, in a television report.

Bourlard said the institute compared the voice on the tape, first aired two weeks ago on the Arab satellite television station Al-Jazeera, with some 20 earlier recordings attributed to bin Laden.

Bourlard, a voice recognition expert, has worked as co-editor-in-chief of the Speech Communication journal with ICSI director Nelson Morgan, and as an adviser to the European Commission.

On its Internet site, the IDIAP describes itself as a semiprivate research institute affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Geneva. It carries out research in the fields of speech and speaker recognition, computer vision and machine learning.

Officials at the institute could not be reached for comment late Thursday.

U.S. experts have maintained the tape will likely never be fully authenticated because its poor quality defies complete analysis by even the most sophisticated voice print technology.

In the tape, the speaker refers to recent terrorist strikes U.S. officials believe are connected to bin Laden's al-Qaida network. If fully verified, it would provide the first evidence in a year that bin Laden survived U.S. bombing in Afghanistan.