KABUL: Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar are alive and healthy, an anti-government militant group said after the Saudi millionaire appeared this month on a new video.
"I don't know exactly where they are but I absolutely know they're alive and healthy," Mohammad Haroon Zarghoon, a spokesman for the renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, said.
"We have no communications but we know through our channels that he (Osama) and Mr Omar are both alive," Zarghoon said by telephone from an unknown location.
Hekmatyar, a former Afghan Prime Minister, is fighting the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai in a rebellion carried out alongside but separately from that of the Taliban.
Zarghoon said the fugitive leaders, both carrying multi-million-dollar bounties on their heads, were hiding in rugged regions along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
He said that since helping Bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, to escape US and Afghan troops in the mountains of Tora Bora in 2002, Hekmatyar's radical Hizb-i-Islami faction had had no direct contact with him.
Despite a massive manhunt by tens of thousands of Western troops, Bin Laden and Omar have escaped arrest.
Bin Laden appeared on a new video released on Friday in which he discussed current events but issued no direct threats. The video appeared to be timed to mark the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment