KANDAHAR, Sept 26: Afghanistan’s Taliban movement said on Tuesday that friends of Osama bin Laden had had said that he was still alive, after a weekend newspaper report suggesting he had died of typhoid.

“We actually don’t have any direct contacts with Al Qaeda in the battlefields because of the current situation,” a Taliban spokesman Mohammad Hanif said, referring to the terror network headed by Osama.

“But according to some of Osama’s friends we’ve contacted, he’s alive,” said Mr Hanif, who tells the media he speaks for the Taliban movement currently locked in a bitter insurgency against Nato and US-led forces in Afghanistan.

A French intelligence memo leaked to a French newspaper at the weekend said that Osama may have died from typhoid fever sometime between Aug 23 and Sept 4.—AFP