KABUL, Oct. 18: Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is living comfortably in a house in northwest Pakistan close to his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, CNN on Monday quoted a Nato official as saying.
The Saudi-born militant wanted for the September 11 attacks on the United States nine years ago was being protected by the local people and “some members of the Pakistani intelligence services,” CNN said. It also said that the Al Qaeda number two, the Egyptian-born Zawahiri, was living close to him.
“Nobody in Al Qaeda is living in a cave,” the unnamed senior Nato official is quoted as saying in a report datelined Kabul. “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,” said the report on CNN’s website.
Pakistan’s mountainous North Waziristan region, which borders Afghanistan, is believed to be a vortex of Afghan, Pakistani and Arab militants, and long held to be a possible hiding place for bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Pakistan on Monday rejected the US media reports that bin Laden and his deputy Zawahiri, were hiding in its north-western region near the Afghan border.
“Stories like this keep on surfacing. Our reaction from day one to such stories is clear — he is not here,” the deputy information minister, Mr Samsam Bokhari, told DPA.
“They always say Osama is here but do not tell us exactly where he is located. We do not believe in these kinds of stories,” he said responding to a story run by the CNN on Monday.
Pakistani authorities have denied they are providing protection for the terror mastermind, who has a $25 million bounty on his head. “It is a baseless assertion, we reject it,” a Pakistani foreign ministry official said.
He said that Pakistani security forces are present in North Waziristan and other tribal areas and if they had known that senior Al Qaeda members were nearby, “we would have taken action immediately.”
The Nato spokesman said the alliance had no immediate comment. Bin Laden is believed to have escaped to the area from Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region during the US-led invasion of late 2001 that unseated the Islamist regime that had given him safe haven.