 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Taliban: Bin Laden is missing
©Washington Post, ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia said Sunday that Osama bin Laden is missing and that messengers have been unable to deliver a request by leading Afghan clerics that he leave the country voluntarily. The claim drew ridicule from U.S. officials who have ordered the Taliban to turn in bin Laden or face military attack. "We are trying to find him, and when he is found we will place the ulema's (clerics') decision before him," Taliban spokesman Abul Hai Mutmaen said. "Then it is up to him to leave Afghanistan or not." U.S. officials immediately dismissed the Taliban statement as unbelievable. "We are not going to be deterred by comments that he may be missing," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, one of several Bush administration officials who appeared on television talk shows in Washington. "We simply don't believe it." Rice reiterated Washington's demands that the Taliban surrender Bin Laden and his assistants or "face the wrath of an international coalition." U.S. officials have accused bin Laden of masterminding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "They know where he is," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told CBS's Face the Nation. "They know their country. It is just not believable that the Taliban do not know." Mutmaen conceded that bin Laden's reported disappearance had not sparked fear for his safety: "He is never alone. He has his followers with him. Also, he knows how to look after himself." The Taliban has reported bin Laden missing at least once before after coming under intense international pressure to surrender the terrorist. In February 1999, six months after bin Laden allegedly directed the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa and 10 days after a State Department official visited Afghanistan to press for his extradition, a Taliban spokesman said bin Laden had "disappeared" and was believed to have left the country. U.S. officials discounted the claim at the time, and bin Laden was sighted in Afghanistan soon after. Rumsfeld acknowledged Sunday that the United States had "lost contact" with an unmanned surveillance plane that Taliban soldiers claimed to have shot down Saturday in northern Afghanistan, but he declined to confirm the aircraft had been shot down. The exchange of rhetoric between Taliban and U.S. officials through the news media came as the United States continued to press nations to join its efforts to fight terrorism -- and to squeeze the Taliban over its harboring of bin Laden.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
