Osama bin Laden, the leader of the international terror group al-Qaeda, seemed to have been focused on U.S. interests in South Korea.

This was revealed in one of 17 letters _ totaling 175 pages _ which bin Laden exchanged with close aides between September 2006 and April 2011, released by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, Thursday. The documents were found when U.S. special troops raided his hideout in Abotabad, Pakistan, in May last year.

In May, 2010, one year before being killed, bin Laden exchanged opinions on Korea in the letter he sent to another al-Qaeda leader Attiyah Abd-al-Rahman. “Security is slack in the states which we have never attacked,” bin Laden said in the letter. “It’ll be better to attack U.S. military installations in non-Islamic states such as South Korea with small groups.” In those states, “we have not bases or partisans or Jihadist groups that could be threatened by danger,” he noted

“Bin Laden seems to have kept in mind U.S. facilities in South Korea although he did not pinpoint targets concretely,” Japan’s Kyoto News also said. “He was hostile towards non-Western countries, such as South Korea and Japan, which supported in the war against Iraq.”