Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network has issued a new manifesto setting out the strategy of the organisation and making a series of chilling threats, a British paper said Sunday, quoting an Al-Jazeera reporter.Yosri Fouda, a London-based journalist for Al-Jazeera TV who in May interviewed two militants who planned the September 11 attacks, said he was sent the untitled document which he believes is from a senior al-Qaeda source.

"It is the closest the organisation has come to setting out a strategy for its war against the 'Jews and Crusaders,'" Fouda told the Sunday Times.

"It is time that we get even. You will be killed just as you kill and will be bombed just as you bomb," the document said, according to Fouda.

"You should expect from us jihad, resistance and punishment."

Justifying its attacks on civilians, it stated that Americans freely vote for their political leader and voluntarily pay taxes that are used to conduct "unjust" wars against Muslims.

"The conclusion is that the American people are the financiers of the attacks against us; they are watching -- through their elected senators -- the spending of those taxes.

"We have the right to attack our attackers, to destroy villages and cities of whoever destroyed our villages and cities, to destroy the economy of those who have robbed our wealth and to kill civilians of the country which has killed ours.

"We regret having to declare to you (the United States) that you are the worst nation in the history of mankind," it said.

"Do your governments not know that the White House gangsters are the biggest butchers of this age?" it asked.

According to Fouda, the message is not just a warning to Western leaders, Arab rulers are also singled out.

"Under your (Arab leaders) supervision, guidance, orders and instructions, agent regimes of our own countries are assaulting us every day... our battle with these regimes is inseparable from our battle with you," it said.

Fouda, who signed himself Al-Jazeera's chief investigative reporter in an article in The Sunday Times, said: "there is hardly a person in the Middle East for whom the words do not find an echo."

"Many believe America is to blame for the present state of the region," he added.

PHOTO CAPTION

Al-Qaeda image from al-Jazeera station