WASHINGTON, Dec 15: In efforts to pinpoint the location of Osama bin Laden, United States forces are said to have detected Osama’s voice as he was talking on a hand-held radio in his Tora Bora mountain redoubt.

Reports here say this is among tons of information that is being gone through by intelligence officials to discover the exact whereabouts of Osama and other top Al Qaeda leaders who have escaped so far capture despite intense pounding of Tora Bora region.

The officials are said to believe that the voice matches known recordings of Osama, and it could strengthen their conviction that he is still in the area.

At a news conference late Friday, Gen Tommy Franks, head of the US Central Command and the man in charge of the Afghanistan campaign, said all technical means were being used to gain insights into where Osama might be. “We also listen to what opposition leaders on the ground have to say, because they each have their own intelligence capability.”

With Al Qaeda forced on to a mountain ridge, the US has widened its intelligence operations, and CIA and special forces officers are examining hundreds of documents, computer hard drives, videotapes and telephone books seized from prisoners. Newspaper reports say there are now about 2,000 to 5,000 Al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners in custody, the latest to surrender being 300 fighters in a valley in Tora Bora. The prisoners, who so far are mostly in the custody of anti-Taliban groups, may be kept at Kandahar airport, which has now been fully taken over by US forces, or even moved to American warships standing off Pakistan’s shore. A detention facility has been set up at Camp Rhino, the original staging post set up by the Americans near Kandahar.

The bulk of the Al Qaeda fighters are believed to be in mountains between the two parallel valleys of Agam and Wazir, leading to Jalalabad in the north and going towards Pakistan border in the south.

With just a week left for the new interim government fashioned at Bonn to take over in Kabul, the US would obviously be keen on ending the Tora Bora siege before that with results to its satisfaction. A hard, last push by US-led forces appears to be under way.

MULLA OMAR: In the concentration of attention and firepower on locating Osama, the whereabouts of Taliban leader Mulla Omar have disappeared as a subject of speculation, and there has been no word in the past couple of days as to where he might be. The Pakhtoon tribes around Kandahar, where Mulla Omar was last believed to have been located, have sought to make a distinction between Afghan Taliban and the non-Afghan Al Qaeda fighters, and displayed a more accommodating attitude towards the former.