Aimed For Osama, Hit With A Fine

A Frenchman was convicted for trying to run over a pedestrian he mistook for Osama bin Laden.

The 35-year-old defendant, identified as a struggling artist named Pierre, was sentenced Tuesday by a court in this southern France city to a three-month suspended prison term and ordered to pay 500 euros ($615) to the victim, who was unharmed.

The man's lawyer, David Mendel, said his client was traumatized by last week's terror attacks in Madrid and was temporarily the "victim of a hallucination," while driving Monday through Montpellier's historic center.

The victim, a man in his 30s, was able to run from the oncoming car, which crashed along the side of a street.

"It wasn't bin Laden," Mendel said. "If it was, we would have won $5 million."

In fact, the U.S. Rewards for Justice program says information leading to bin Laden's capture could fetch a prize of $25 million.

Bin Laden — the suspected mastermind of the 1998 African embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole and the 2001 Sept. 11 hijackings — is widely believed to be hiding in the rugged mountains of Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, not in the Languedoc-Rousillon wine region of which Montpellier is capital.

The Madrid train bombings, which killed 201 people, increasingly appear to have been orchestrated by Islamic extremists with links to bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network.