Kano, Friday
LIBYAN leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi today told a crowd of worshippers in Nigeria that the West was tarnishing the image of Islam by portraying it as a terrorist movement.
''This propaganda is making people shun Islam,'' Gaddafi said in a speech at the Kofar Mata mosque in Kano, the hometown of Nigeria's military ruler General Sani Abacha. The speech was broadcast live on Libyan television.
''Nowadays, they talk about Islam only when they talk about terrorism, killings, extremism, massacres. They mention examples of what is happening in Islamic countries like Algeria: the killing of women, children, the elderly, innocent people who are slaughtered with knives, and whose heads are severed with axes.''
Gaddafi added: ''I want to stress to the world today from the town of Kano, from the heart of Islam, from the heart of Africa, that what is happening in Algeria and the like is not Islamic extremism, Islamic violence or Islamic terrorism.
''What is happening in Algeria is being perpetrated by a movement that is anti-Islamic, outside Islam, a movement that is an enemy of Islam. This movement is called the heresy movement.''
State radio said Gaddafi was accompanied by President Ibrahim Bare Mainassara of Niger, which he visited on Thursday at the start of a two-day West African trip. The two leaders, like their Nigerian counterpart, are shunned by the West.
Thousands of people had earlier lined the streets to Kano airport and Muslim youths carried banners with pictures of Gaddafi and Abacha.
Gaddafi's trip to West Africa is in apparent defiance of a 1992 UN embargo on flights from his country, imposed for Libya's failure to extradite two agents linked to the bombing of the PanAm flight over Lockerbie in 1988 and four agents linked to the 1989 bombing of a French airliner.
The Libyan news agency JANA said Gaddafi was visiting Niger and Nigeria as the leader of the Islamic Popular Leadership, an organisation he created in 1989.
Nigeria's Abacha has been shunned by the West since his 1993 coup.-Reuter
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