IN THE ruins of an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul, The Times found evidence 14 months ago of how Osama bin Laden was amassing an armoury of chemical weapons, including ricin.

Instructions for preparing this deadly poison littered the cellar together with with propaganda documents and drawings of how to manufacture bombs.

The heavily gated villa in the Saraq Panza district of the Afghan capital had been a training camp for some of al-Qaeda’s handpicked foreign agents.

Two Arab doctors lived there during the Taleban’s reign and neighbours had watched a succession of young men of various nationalities being ushered into the fortified villa.

Local people knew better than to ask questions about what they were doing inside the imposing building.

With the fall of the Taleban, the villa was swiftly looted of all its valuables as the Taleban fled. The doctors, one travelling on a Saudi passport, the other with German papers, were beaten and shot dead as they tried to escape in November 2001.

In the dimly lit cellar the Times journalist Anthony Loyd found ampules, syringes and pills scattered across the floor, with the instructions for making ricin concealed among a mass of paperwork showing how to make fuses and detonation circuits.

Evidence of the doctors’ chemical experiments was hidden in five cardboard boxes. The two men had fled in such haste that they did not have time to destroy their incriminating research.

Most of the jumbled papers were either chemical formulae or in Arabic. A single English word was printed at the top of one document — ricin.

The instructions made chilling reading. “A certain amount, equal to a strong dose, will be able to kill an adult, and a dose equal to seven seeds will kill a child,” one page read.

Another page said: “Gloves and face mask are essential for the preparation of ricin. Period of death varies from 3-5 days minimum, 4-14 days maximum.”

The doctors had listed the symptoms of ricin poisoning as vomiting, stomach cramps, extreme thirst, bloody diarrhoea, throat irritation, respiratory collapse and death. What it did not say is whether they had tested the ricin.

One of the most disturbing videos that President Bush has watched is of al-Qaeda terrorists testing various poisons on animals, including donkeys and chickens. Dogs and rabbits were filmed tethered in small wire cages while masked militants dosed them with cyanide and ricin.

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