LONDON, Dec 9: A British newspaper has claimed that Mulla Omar has been held captive apparently near the city of Kandahar.

The Sunday Times quoting Khaled Pashtoon, a spokesman for Gul Agha Sherzai, a Kandahar commander, said the Taliban supreme leader was near the city in the custody of a warlord sympathetic to the fundamentalist regime.

“Mr Pashtoon said that Mulla Omar was being held in a “(Taliban)-friendly environment,” but his group would demand that the Taliban supreme leader be handed over, probably to the new Afghan government, at a tribal meeting.”

Hamid Karzai, the prime minister-designate of the Afghan interim government, said that he did not know the location of Mulla Omar. “But of course I want to arrest him. I have given him every chance to denounce terrorism and now the time has run out,” he said.

The paper says: “Mulla Omar’s apparent captivity will boost Western morale at a time when many thought that the goals of the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan were not being met. It raises the prospect, however, of tortuous negotiations over a possible trial between the Americans and the new Afghan administration.”

“The Pentagon said that word of Mulla Omar’s capture was “potentially interesting”. It said, however, that it had no independent verification from US special forces. A spokesman said: “In the absence of that we will tend to see what comes out.”

Mulla Omar’s apparent capture ended a day of confusion, during which it appeared that he might have escaped the grip of the new Afghan administration, and the Americans.

Gen Tommy Franks, the overall commander of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, said minutes before initial reports of Mulla Omar’s detention that the Taliban spiritual leader had “vanished”. Correcting himself, he said that he did not know where Mulla Omar was.