Islamabad: Pakistan Monday refuted a reported claim by an unidentified senior Nato official in Kabul that Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri were hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan.
“I categorically deny presence of Al Qaida leaders and even Taliban leader Mullah Omar in any part of Pakistan,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told a news conference in the southern port city of Karachi.
Malik said the government had already assured its full cooperation with the world community in sharing information in this regard.
A CNN report from Kabul quoted the unnamed Nato official as saying nobody in Al Qaida was living in a cave; rather, Al Qaida's top leadership “is believed to be living in relative comfort, protected by locals and some members of the Pakistani intelligence service”.
The official claimed the general region where Bin Laden is likely to have moved around in recent years ranges from the mountainous Chitral area in the far northwest near the Chinese border, to the Kurram Valley which neighbours Afghanistan’s Tora Bora, one of the Taliban strongholds during the US invasion in 2001.
Tora Bora is also the region from which Bin Laden is believed to have escaped during a US bombing raid in late 2001. US officials have long said there have been no confirmed sightings of Bin Laden or Al Zawahiri for several years.
The official also confirmed the US assessment that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, has moved between the cities of Quetta and Karachi in Pakistan over the last several months, the CNN report said.
The official would not discuss how the coalition has come to know any of this information, but he has access to some of the most sensitive information in the Nato alliance, it added.
The Pakistani interior minister said similar reports of Bin Laden and Mullah Omar’s whereabouts had proven false in the past.
Malik said any information to the contrary should be shared with Pakistani officials so that they can take "immediate action" to arrest the pair.
