Salt Lake has eye out for bin Laden

He has been spotted driving on the Inter-State, strolling through the mall and eating a Big Mac.

Call it paranoia, a bad case of the jitters or just wishful thinking but there has been a rash of Osama bin Laden sightings in and around Salt Lake City with the 2002 Winter Olympic now just over a month away.

The FBI confirmed on Friday it had received over two-dozen calls from Utah residents convinced they had spotted the world's most wanted man, believing bin Laden had slipped through the U.S. military's Afghanistan dragnet and hiding out in the mountains that will soon play host to the Winter Games.

"I don't have an exact number but there have probably been around 25 reported sightings," said FBI spokesperson Kevin Eaton. "A lot of them are just things you can't follow up on like, I saw Bin Laden driving down the Inter-State in a Volkswagen or getting a drink at the 7-11 in Provo.

"So we're really not doing much with them. On a priority list following up on these would be near the bottom."

"For the most part I think these people truly believe they saw him. I don't think these are crank calls.

"But I would think bin Laden could find better places to blend in than Salt Lake City."

With the Salt Lake Organising Committee (SLOC) spending $270 million on Olympic security, the Winter Games would likely be the last place the man accused of being the mastermind behind the September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington would choose to hideout.

But according to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune, security experts are taking no chances, adding bin Laden's facial profile, along with those of top ranking al-Qaida members, to the computer database of the FaceTrac surveillance system that will screen every spectator attending Olympic hockey games at the E Centre.

Twelve cameras will be set up at entrances around the arena taking pictures of people's faces and then feeding that information into a computer, which will search its database of criminals for a match.

The cutting edge technology, that can measure 128 facial features in a fraction of second, is the same used at the Super Bowl and Las Vegas casinos.

"Cameras at each entrance will scan everyone's face," said West Valley police chief Alan Kerstein, whose men will man the surveillance setup. "It scans, matches and goes on to the next person all in a milli-second.

"But I don't think too many people have to worry about Osama bin Laden appearing at the U.S. hockey final.

"For one thing, I think the tickets are too expensive for him."

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