July 5, 2003	Saturday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 4,1424

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PARIS, July 4: After many months of hesitation, France’s DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French FBI) is proclaiming that Osama bin Laden is alive and well, and living on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, at least according to a high-level intelligence operative.

According to the high-level DST operative cited by Le Figaro, “Bin Laden has indeed been able to move about regularly, although in a highly-protected fashion, within networks or tribes which we know ourselves to be practically inpenetratable and where he is known to be in great security.”

“And, as these are the same tribes which travel back and forth across Afghanistan’s frontier with Pakistan, or that with Iran, observers along the way believe they’ve seen him just about everywhere. Which is why nobody can pretend to say, to this day, that Osama bin Laden is in any way dead.”

And nobody is denying that it is a curious coincidence that the information is being leaked to the press— notably in national daily Le Figaro, a newspaper with close links to President Jacques Chirac and France’s secret services — at the very moment when President Pervez Musharraf is in Paris to discuss the stepping up of Franco-Pakistani efforts to combat terrorism.

France recently signed on with Washington to provide US special forces in Afghanistan.