DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - The Arabic-language Al-Jazeera news station acknowledged Wednesday that it refrained from broadcasting several videos of Osama bin Laden, taken before and after Sept. 11, for editorial or technical reasons.
Ibrahim Helal, the station's editor-in-chief, said the collection may include a videotape that was referred to in a dossier released by the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
``We have many tapes we didn't run from Afghanistan. Some bin Laden tapes we didn't run even before this crisis, where he would read the Quran and preach religious things not important to run,'' Helal said.
Helal said the station has received four or five bin Laden tapes since Sept. 11, but declined to say whether they were interviews conducted by his reporters or videos given to the station by the Saudi exile.
``We decide not to run tapes if there is nothing newsy in them,'' he said, adding that the station has not been subject to any government pressure to pull the bin Laden tapes.
The station's reputation among viewers in the region as an independent voice could be tarnished by reports it had a newsworthy tape of bin Laden but decided against broadcasting it.
The tapes were received via satellite from the Al-Jazeera bureau in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and Helal suggested that regional intelligence services monitoring transmissions from Kabul could have intercepted the tapes.
``They use their technology to get the tapes and their influence in Washington to press us,'' Helal said. ``They want to destroy our image in order to close this free window in the region.''
Based in Qatar, Al-Jazeera was one of a handful of news organizations allowed to work in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after U.S. airstrikes began on Oct. 7.
Al-Jazeera has broadcast five taped al-Qaida statements since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that bin Laden is thought to have masterminded. Al-Jazeera last broadcast a bin Laden tape on Nov. 3.
Critics of Al-Jazeera, including some in the Bush administration, have called the coverage propagandist and inflammatory. The White House asked U.S. networks to refrain from airing the videotapes in full, fearing they might contain coded messages, and also asked the Qatari government to get Al-Jazeera to do the same.