October 9, 2002	Wednesday	Sha’aban 2, 1423

WASHINGTON, Oct 8: Osama bin Laden remains an elusive “fixation” a year after the start of a US military campaign to uproot his Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged on Monday.

Rumsfeld said as many as 20 top Al Qaeda leaders remain unaccounted for and there has been no new evidence that Osama is alive and functioning since December.

“So he’s therefore either alive and well, or alive and not too well, or not alive,” he told reporters.

Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television news network, on Sunday broadcast what it said was an audio tape of Osama warning that the “youth of Islam” would strike vital US economic targets.

Rumsfeld said it was impossible to tell when the tape was made because it contained no reference to events that could date it.

Rumsfeld recalled that from the outset of the war he had tried to discourage people from “personalizing this global war on terrorism into the face or name of a single individual.”

“I failed,” he said. “There’s a fixation on him. And I suppose we’ll just all have to work our way through it.”

“Needless to say, we would like to locate him and determine what his circumstance is,” he said.—AFP