The FBI admitted on Saturday that it used an online photo of a Spanish politician to create an image of how a 52-year-old Osama Bin Laden might look like today.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper “El Mundo,” the FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman admitted a forensic artist working for the agency had obtained certain features “from a photograph he found on the internet” of Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares.
“It’s shameless,” Mr. Llamazares said on Saturday. “It shows the low level and in what hands the U.S. security is right now.”
The digitally-altered photos of the al-Qaeda leader were published on the state department's Rewards for Justice website, rewardsforjustice.net, listing a reward of up to $25 million.
The agency said it will remove the poster from its website, however at the time of this publication the image still remained in the government website.
Mr. Llamazares said there was another digitally-altered image of him in the U.S. government’s site that was also recreated to show how another suspected terrorist may look like today. He is referring to an image of how Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a man the U.S. government says is “the al-Qa'ida emissary in Iran as appointed by Osama bin Laden,” may look like today.
FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman said late on Saturday that the FBI will “take down the 14 images” his technicians created for both Bin Laden and Abd al-Rahman, and they will begin a review of each photo and the procedures followed to create such digital renderings.
Mr. Hoffman said one of his technicians chose the picture of Mr. Llamazares from Google images without knowing who he was. “It wasn’t intentional,” he declared to Spanish newspaper
