Taliban claims bin Laden has disappeared

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban claimed yesterday that Osama bin Laden had disappeared and that they were trying to trace the Saudi-born millionaire to deliver last week's edict by Islamic clerics urging the militia to persuade their "guest" to leave Afghanistan of his own free will.

But Washington has refused to waver from its ultimatum to the ruling Taliban to surrender bin Laden or face military strikes.

"Osama bin Laden is missing. We are searching for him," Taliban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutmaen was quoted as saying from Kandahar by the Pakistan-based private news agency, Afghan Islamic Press.

He said Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar had endorsed a fatwa or edict from Afghanistan's religious elders last week asking the militia to persuade bin Laden to leave the country voluntarily. But Taliban officials had been unable to find the Saudi-born dissident to inform him of the decision.

"We are still making efforts to locate him. When he is found the edict will be delivered to him," Mutmaen said.

But Afghan embassy sources in Islamabad revealed that bin Laden was not out of reach of the Taliban as they claimed and he was somewhere inside Afghanistan.

Several knowledgeable Afghans living in Pakistan dismissed the claim as a ruse. They said it was meant to deflect mounting pressure on the militia amid massive U.S. military mobilisation in preparation for a crackdown on bin Laden and his network.

Afghan watchers recall a similar report about the sudden disappearance of Bin Laden a few years ago amid intense U.S. and UN pressure for his handover to stand trial over 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa. He reappeared after sometime and the Taliban renewed their demands for hard evidence against bin Laden and refused to expel him.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, through the official Pakistan press agency has also strongly denied reports that bin Laden had crossed secretly into China.

A former Afghan politician here said even if bin Laden were to leave Afghanistan, no country would be willing to take the risk of giving him refuge. There are no flights out of Afghanistan and he would surely be taken into custody if he entered Pakistan or any of the other five neighbouring countries by land, the Afghan politician said.

"All this noise about disappearance is meant to deflect pressure and buy time" he told Gulf News.

Bin Laden is known to have hideouts at several places in Afghanistan, as well as a small army of mostly Arab soldiers as well as staff made up mainly of Bangladeshis. He has reportedly fired all his Pakistani staff, insiders told Gulf News.

Meanwhile U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday said in answer to reports that bin Laden was missing, that the United States would not have won until it caught every one of the thousands of members of his group.

The U.S. will soon release evidence linking bin Laden to the attacks on New York and Washington.

Powell told the NBC's Meet the Press programme, "We are hard at work bringing all the information together – intelligence information, law enforcement information."

"I think in the near future, we will be able to put out a paper, a document, that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking him to this attack," he added.