LONDON - Osama bin Laden, prime suspect behind the September 11 attacks on America, is probably dead and his recent video broadcast looked like the farewell message of a doomed man, a former friend and journalist said on Thursday.

"I 99 per cent believe he's been killed in the caves of Afghanistan by the very hard bombing," Essam Darez, an Egyptian freelance writer who spent time with Bin Laden in Afghanistan between 1986 and 1990, told Reuters in an interview.

During four years as a photojournalist covering the Afghan mujahideen's struggle against occupying Soviet troops, Darez said he got to know Bin Laden intimately, sharing meals and spartan living quarters in his mountain hideouts.

His photographs of the crouched warrior silhouetted against the barren skyline or receiving treatment from a portable dialysis machine returned to prominence after September 11.

American heavy bombers have pounded the mountain cave complexes said to have housed Bin Laden's al Qaeda network, but the trail leading to the world's most wanted man has gone cold.

There are numerous theories on what might have happened to Bin Laden, and a spokesman for the US-led anti-terror coalition said in Pakistan on Wednesday he was still being sought "on land, in the air and on sea".

But Darez said a video broadcast in late December, of Bin Laden delivering a rambling, improvised address in which he described the West's "loathing" for Islam, could well be the last the world ever sees of him.

"He looked like a sick man who felt he was going to die and that he must deliver this message before he did," Darez said of Bin Laden, once a leader of the mujahideen guerrillas who waged a bloody war against Soviet forces in the 1980s.

Darez (55), a former Egyptian army officer who hopes to publish a book about Bin Laden's mujahideen years, said that during that time Bin Laden was essentially a good man.

"He was a great fighter. That is why the Arabs came round him," Darez said.

"He wasn't charismatic, but he had a human touch with all people. He didn't act like a boss, but treated you like a brother."

The first signs of his anti-Americanism came soon after the Soviet army pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989.

But Darez argued that, contrary to received wisdom, his all-consuming hatred of America was not sparked by US troops being stationed in his native Saudi Arabia in August 1990 in the run-up to the Gulf War.

The real turning point came in 1992 when Bin Laden, having been kicked out of Saudi Arabia, arrived in Sudan, an Islamic east African state branded by Washington as a pariah sponsor of international terrorism, Darez said.

"I tried to stop him going to Sudan and told him it was the wrong time and the wrong place and that he would end up as an enemy of his own country," Deraz said, adding that he had never seen him again and condemned the atrocities of which Bin Laden has been accused.

"Sudan made the big change in him. The people around him were very tough in Sudan and they pushed him to be leader of a new Islamic revolution," he said. - Nampa-Reuters