November 23rd, 2001 Posted: 0930 GMT

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network had been preparing terrorist attacks with the lethal sarin nerve gas before its infrastructure in Afghanistan was destroyed, according to a Spanish journalist who found phials marked as containing the gas at a camp outside Jalalabad.
El Mundo correspondent Julio Fuentes, who was last night reported dead after a convoy of journalists was attacked on the road to Kabul, found 300 of the phials at an abandoned al-Qaida base known as Farm Hada, 20 km south of Jalalabad.

His report, published yesterday, stated that they were in boxes of 10 which bore, in Russian cyrillic script, the words "SARIN/V-GAS". The phials were about seven centimetres long and contained a clear, yellowish liquid.

The Farm Hada base had been abandoned in a rush and was strewn with empty test tube racks, landmines, grenades and artillery shells.

Sarin gas was used by the Aum Supreme Truth cult in its attack on Tokyo's underground rail system in March 1995.

That attack killed 12 people and left nearly 1,000 ill.