Videotape

WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden, who has thrust himself into the American presidential race in its waning days, is probably still hiding in the rugged border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the U.S. military. It was through the snow-capped mountains in that region that bin Laden narrowly escaped three years ago, frustrating a military operation that has been a campaign issue for months. Democratic candidate John Kerry repeated charges yesterday that the Bush administration bungled the raid in the Tora Bora mountains to capture bin Laden in December 2001.

WORLD Bin Laden addresses Americans In a new videotape released yesterday, Osama bin Laden speaks directly to the American public, saying, "Your security is not in the hands of [Sen. John] Kerry or [President] Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands." On the tape, bin Laden appears to taunt Bush, making an apparent reference to the president's continuing his visit to an elementary school classroom after he was notified about the attack on the World Trade Center. [Page 1a]

WASHINGTON - On April 18, 2003, a television news crew from Minnesota videotaped U.S. troops in Iraq using bolt cutters to break through chains and wire seals on the door of a dusty bunker and finding explosives stored inside. The video did not appear significant at the time, particularly because it did not reveal any weapons of mass destruction. But now, days before a presidential election that is turning on how President Bush has handled Iraq, it appears to be the strongest evidence so far in the debate over whether a huge cache of explosives disappeared on the Americans' watch.

In the back yard of his Walkersville home, Ray Matlock sits in a gazebo as two Siamese cats spar. They'll be all right, he says. They make him smile, even today. The midday is perfectly weathered: a sneak of full fall in the air, football weather. Matlock wears a Ravens visor and talks so softly you wonder if he is always this soft-spoken, or whether the death of his boy has knocked the words out of him. A 1968 Oldsmobile is in the garage; his son had restored the classic. The car is a surviving point of pride.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Islamic militants in Iraq have beheaded hostage Kenneth Bigley, the British Embassy and his family said yesterday, bringing a tragic end to the three-week effort to save the Briton's life. A videotape purported to show the beheading was released to news organizations. The tape shows Bigley in an orange jumpsuit kneeling in front of six armed men, Reuters reported. After the 62-year-old engineer read a statement, one of the men pulled a knife from his belt and sawed off Bigley's head as three men held him down, the news agency said.

WHEN MARYLAND prison guards must forcibly remove an inmate from a cell, they are required to videotape the action. This is to document the "extraction" and determine if staffers followed procedure in restraining a prisoner. That's sound public policy because it protects the interests of the state and the rights of the imprisoned. When questions arise, the state has a ready -- and recorded -- response. For that reason, state prisons chief Mary Ann Saar's refusal to release such a videotape in the April death of inmate Ifeanyi A. Iko is unacceptable.

Pointing to the videotaping of a Jewish school in Baltimore last year by a Saudi national, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. announced a $100,000 state Homeland Security grant for a Jewish day school in Montgomery County yesterday and plans to award $130,000 more to Jewish institutions in Baltimore this week. The Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, which has 1,500 kindergarten-through-12th-grade students in Rockville, received the first grant. Tomorrow, the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation in Park Heights is slated to get $30,000, and the Jewish Community Center of Baltimore is to receive $37,000 for its Owings Mills campus and $63,000 for its location in Park Heights.

Saudi Arabian forces searched yesterday for a U.S. worker taken hostage by militants linked to al-Qaida, while 7,400 miles away in Port St. John, Fla., his son wanted someone to teach him how to pray. The apparent kidnapping of former Brevard County resident Paul M. Johnson Jr., 49, so upset Johnson's 28-year-old son that he wanted to go find a church, even though he had never been in one. "I want to go and ask someone to help me say some prayers," Paul Marshall Johnson III said yesterday, barely holding back tears as he sat on his front porch clutching his father's picture.

Upset that his friend Ben Vassiliev hadn't given him birthday and Christmas presents and fearful that he no longer "cared," Ryan Furlough told investigators that he turned to the Internet in the fall of 2002 to find the best way to kill Vassiliev - and himself. He chose cyanide for its simplicity and ability to produce "instantaneous" results, all the while waiting for the 17-year-old Vassiliev to prove him wrong, Furlough said through tears. "But when it was nothing again and again and again, I started to accept the fact that for some reason or another, he just doesn't care about me anymore," he said during a lengthy videotaped police interview that was played yesterday in Howard Circuit Court during the third day of testimony in Furlough's trial on murder charges.

A Carroll County man has been charged with second-degree assault in the attempted choking of an assistant varsity coach at Liberty High School during a brawl at a high school boys lacrosse game last week, Maryland State Police said yesterday. William A. Bell Jr., 39, of the first block of Fairview Ave. in Mount Airy was charged Thursday by police in the assault on assistant coach Micah S. Reese during a melee between the South Carroll and Liberty High School lacrosse teams at an evening game April 30 at Liberty's field in Eldersburg.