FBI turned Spanish MP into Bin Laden

The former leader of the Spanish Communist Party is threatening to take the FBI to court after it used his photograph to compose its latest mugshot of Osama bin Laden.

"I am stupefied the FBI has used my photo to compose a picture of a terrorist," said Gaspar Llamazares, now the parliamentary spokesman for the United Left.



"It affects my honour, my own image and also the security of all of us," he said, adding that he would no longer feel safe travelling to the US given the growing use of biometric technology to compare facial features with passengers' passport photos.

The FBI's "age processed" image of Bin Laden was a version of the agency's 1998 photo of the reclusive al-Qa'ida leader, digitally altered to show how he might have aged in the nine years since he is believed to have evaded US special forces in Afghanistan and gone into hiding.



The FBI said the forensic artist working on the image had been unable to find any photographs with suitable features in the agency's archive, so instead he doctored a picture he found on the internet.

The FBI was aware of the similarities between the Bin Laden photo and that of "an existing photograph of a Spanish public official", special agent Jason Pack said. "The forensic artist was not aware of the identity of the individual depicted in the photograph," Mr Pack said, adding that the image would be removed from the website.