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LONDON, Sunday (Reuters,AFP) An audio tape purportedly of top al Qaeda official Ayman al-Zawahri warned the United States on Sunday it would pay a high price if it harmed any of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.The voice on the tape, broadcast by the Dubai-based Arabic television Al Arabiya, also told the United States that the "real battle" against it has not started yet.

"America has announced it will start putting on trial in front of military tribunals the Muslim detainees at Guantanamo and might sentence them to death...," said the voice, which Al Arabiya television identified as Zawahri's.

"I swear in the name of God that the crusader America will pay a dear price for any harm it inflicts on any of the Muslim detainees...."

It was the first audio tape said to be by Zawahri - considered to be Osama bin Laden's right-hand man - since May 2 when another tape sent to an Arabic television also made threats against the United States.

Al Arabiya television gave no other details about the tape.

"We tell America only one thing. What you have suffered until now is only the initial skirmishes. The real battle has not started yet," the voice said."Let those who conspire with America know that America is incapable of protecting itself...and let every captive held by the infidels be assured that the day of liberation is soon...," it added.

U.S. President George W. Bush vowed last Wednesday to thwart what he said was a "real threat" of new al Qaeda attacks and the Homeland Security Department recently warned the airline industry that al Qaeda was planning new suicide hijackings and bombings in the United States or abroad.

The United States is holding more than 600 people from 42 nations as prisoners at the special camp at the Guantanamo Bay naval base. The prisoners include nationals from Britain, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan but the U.S. military has not given a precise breakdown.

The men, suspected members of al Qaeda and others caught in what Bush calls the U.S. war on terror, have been held and interrogated without being charged. Washington said last month six foreign suspects, including two Britons and an Australian, being held at Guantanamo Bay, could face military trial as part of the war on terror.

The trials could bring about the death penalty.

The United States alleges the six attended "terrorist" training camps and may have been involved in financing al Qaeda.

Bowing to pressure from Britain and Australia, the United States said later it would not seek the death penalty in any military trials held for the two British and one Australian suspects. Menwhile the top US civilian administrator of Iraq has raised alarm over the threat of al-Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups waging continuing war on US troops in Iraq, as Saddam Hussein's slain sons, Uday and Qusay, were lain to rest in their father's native village of Awja.

On the same day, another another US soldier was killed, an almost daily occurrance in the guerrilla insurgency that was showing no signs of abating.

"There are three areas of concern and they tend to overlap," US administrator Paul Bremer told reporters.

"First of all, there is the long-standing concern of the evidence of connections between the former regime and al-Qaeda that goes back almost a decade.

"Secondly, there is clear evidence of an al-Qaeda related terrorist group, the Ansar al-Islam, reconstituting its capabilities inside of Iraq since the war," Bremer said. Ansar al-Islam is a shadowy group operating on the border of eastern Kurdistan, bombed by the US airforce during its invasion of Iraq launched March 20.

Uday and Qusay Hussein, the 'enfants terribles' of the old regime, along with Saddam's 14-year-old grandson Mustapha, were buried in a low-key funeral in Awja near the fallen dictator's powerbase of Tikrit, 175 kilometres (110 miles) north of Baghdad. Karim Suleiman al-Majid, an uncle, and tribal chieftains of Saddam's family, Mohammed al-Nada and Ali al-Nada, attended the funeral of the trio gunned down 11 days ago in a shootout with US forces in the northern city of Mosul, Bakr said.

Bremer said the informer whose tip-off led to the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons has been relocated outside of Iraq and an Iraqi will soon turn in the dictator-on-the-run and claim the 25-million-dollar price on his head.

"We are going to get Saddam too," he said. "The only question is who is going to get the 25 million dollars and move to another country."

The man who blew the whistle on Uday and Qusay is widely believed to be Nawaf al-Zaidan, the tribal chief who owned the mansion where the pair fought their last stand.

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