Thaindian News

Washington DC, Jan 19 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The U.S. State Department has withdrawn a mocked-up image of how the dreaded Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden would look today, The Sunday Times of London reported. The newspaper also reported that the picture has vanished from the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Web site after the FBI admitted it generated the picture not from using “cutting edge” technology as it originally claimed, but by merely altering a photo of a Spanish lawmaker who had criticized the U.S. “war on terror.” The FBI have admitted their mistake.

FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that an computer technician at the premier agency, had committed a hideous mistake when he simply used a common-place software application to cut and paste an old photograph of left-wing Spanish politician Gaspar Llamazares into a mock-up of Bin Laden, to create the offensive mocked up picture of the dreaded terrorist. “The forensic artist was unable to find suitable features among the reference photographs and obtained those features, in part, from a photograph he found on the Internet,” Hoffman said.

“I was surprised and angered because it’s the most shameless use of a real person to make up the image of a terrorist,” Llamazares told The Sunday Times. “It’s almost like out of a comedy, if it didn’t deal with matters as serious as bin Laden and citizens’ security.”