Islamic Revolutionaries' Gardening Roots Exposed

A BBC TV show featuring interviews with people who've met Osama Bin Laden revealed this week that the Saudi terror chief used to be a fanatical gardener, in the days before he devoted himself entirely to attacking the West.

"My sunflowers are bigger, and of better quality, than American sunflowers," the al Qaida chief reportedly told an Arab reporter in the 90s, a boast which referred to the millions of millions of sunflowers he was then growing in Sudan, via his front company Blessed Fruits.

Bizarrely, Bin Laden's horticultural interests reflected those of Iran's equally infamous Islamic leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who draw on his gardening knowledge to inspire Iranians to overthrow the Shah in 1979.

"Our movement is but a fragile plant," Ayatollah Khomeini said in 1978 just before the revolution started.

"It needs the blood of martyrs to help it grow into a towering tree."

More sinisterly, British police found more than half a tonne of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, 'prime bomb-making material', as police put it, when they arrested eight British people in an anti-terror operation this week. The fertiliser is widely available over the net, the BBC reported, with farmers its principal customers.
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