Pakistan Denies Report of Bin Laden Arrest

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan denied on Wednesday that al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, had been arrested in Pakistan.

Pakistan's interior minister described as baseless and unfounded the report by an official of a small Pakistani political party. Officials in Washington said they had no information to back up the report.

"This is absolutely unfounded and absolutely baseless," Pakistan's Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told Reuters.

A U.S. administration spokesman in Washington said: "We have no information to substantiate that claim." That view was echoed by two other U.S. officials.

Pakistani politician Agha Murtaza Pooya, the deputy head of the Pakistan Awami Tehreek, told Reuters he said bin Laden was in custody but he did not know where he was being held.

"I just said he's in custody. I didn't say where he was captured or what... I said he's in custody. And in custody of those that are chasing him."

The governments of Afghanistan and Germany also denied the report. "We have no knowledge of that," said a spokesman for Germany's BND foreign intelligence service.

In London, the dollar rose briefly against the euro and the Swiss franc, and equity futures in the United States were roiled by the report, originally sourced to an Iranian radio station and picked up by the BBC monitoring service.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,912792,00.html

US: no evidence of 'Bin Laden capture'

The US today said it had no information to substantiate reports that Osama bin Laden had been captured in Pakistan.
"We have no information to substantiate that claim," a government spokesman said.

Iranian Radio today reported that the al-Qaida leader was being held by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency and that US troops were present.

The hunt for Bin Laden has been stepped up since evidence found during the arrest and early interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected architect of the September 11 attacks, appears to have encouraged intelligence agents to believe they are closer to the US's most wanted man.

A Pakistani intelligence official this week said Mohammed's arrest "is bringing us significantly closer to Osama".

"We appear to be just hours behind him," he said. "Khalid Sheikh said he met with him in December. We were months behind, then weeks, and now hours behind him."

Leaflets have been dropped in recent weeks in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan, offering rewards for the capture of Bin Laden and other senior al-Qaida figures.

If bin Laden were captured, the last thing we would want to do is have the A-Q rats start scrambling for cover before we can round them up. On the contrary, the idea is to capture bin Laden and scan his computer and papers for all the A-Q contacts and then get our police in position to bust them. My guess is that bin Laden has been captured and that we're starting the process of clearing the decks of all A-Q rats before they know the jig is up. This is an excellent sign that bin Laden has indeed been captured.

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