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| March 9, 2003 | Sunday | Muharram 5, 1424 |
Al Qaeda hunters’ focus narrows
ISLAMABAD, March 8: US and Pakistani hunters zeroed in on Saturday on the junction of the Pakistani, Afghan and Iranian borders for Osama bin Laden’s sons and his deputy Ayman al- Zawarhi, security officials said.
“The triangle of the borders is the focus of the hunt,” a senior security official familiar with the search operation told newsmen.
Pakistani troops guided by US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) experts used helicopters and ground forces to scour roughly 400 square kilometres of rugged mountains and inhospitable desert at the triangular border region, he said.
The search for Osama meanwhile was focussed on Pakistan’s northwest border with Afghanistan, in the tribal border belt and district of Chitral north of the tribal zone, officials said.
The hunt has gained new impetus since the March 1 capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States and believed to be Al Qaeda’s third most senior figure.
“We are 90 per cent certain he is alive but we are still in the dark about his exact whereabouts,” a senior security official familiar with Khalid’s interrogations told newsmen.
Evidence found on Khalid, including data and letters written in code, indicated that Ayman was holed up in border areas of Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest and most sparsely populated province in its southwest.
“Analysis of the documents suggested al-Zawahri was alive and somewhere in Balochistan,” another security official closely involved in investigations told newsmen.
Joint hunt teams were also searching other pockets of Balochistan’s 760-kilometre western border with Iran and the province’s 1,600 kilometre north-western border with Afghanistan.
The pockets included a region around the coastal town of Jiwani, 30 kilometres east of the Iranian frontier and 50 kilometres west of the port of Gwadar.
They were also combing the northwest Balochistan border districts of Chagai, facing Afghanistan’s southwestern Nimroz province, and Dalbandin.
Colonel Roger King, US military spokesman at Bagram air base north of the Afghan capital Kabul, did not deny there may be a US presence in Nimroz. He said, however, he was unable to comment on any possible CIA presence, only comment on the activities of the Combined Joint Task Force 180 (CJTF180), or the international military coalition.
“CJTF 180 does not have forces operating in the area of Ribat at this time,” King said.
Dalbandin is the second-largest of at least four Pakistani airbases and airstrips used by US-led coalition troops for the past 18 months to crush and hunt down Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in Afghanistan.
A security official familiar with Baloch border areas said the terrain was “extremely impassable” at several points.
“Not even 100 helicopters can detect cross-border movements,” he said.—AFP
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