I'm not sure I'd go that far...
The Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said yesterday Al Qaeda had been seriously weakened by the current roundup of arrests of key operatives and was "in the process of dismantling." "The noose around Al Qaeda is tightening. But it does not mean we are close to capturing Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri," Hayat said in an interview. "We have no accurate information the location of Bin Laden. No one knows with any sort of accuracy about the whereabouts of Osama or Al Zawahiri."
| "We don't know if it's Qazi's guesthouse, or Fazl's, or Sami's or Hafez Saeed's!" |
He said none of the intelligence gathered in the current crackdown pointed to any particular location of the elusive terror network chief. "He could be anywhere," the minister said.
| "He's everywhere! He's everywhere!" |
Bin Laden and Zawahiri, his Egyptian deputy, are believed to be hiding in the mountains straddling the porous 2,450km border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There has been no confirmed sighting of them since the December 2001 US-led assault on the Tora Bora mountains on the Afghan side of the border. Intelligence officials in Pakistan believe Bin Laden is still alive, but say they have no clear information his whereabouts. In the past month Pakistani agencies have penetrated a major Al Qaeda wing, capturing more than 20 Al Qaeda suspects, including a gallery of top operatives who were in the throes of plotting fresh terror strikes in Britain, Pakistan and the United States. "We have been able to arrest quite a number of them, around two dozen since July," Hayat said. |