KANDAHAR, Jan 20: The search for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was concentrated on two provinces in central and south-eastern Afghanistan, an adviser to Kandahar governor Gul Agha said on Sunday.

“We are sure that he is alive, we are sure that he is in Afghanistan,” the adviser, Mohammad Yusuf Pashtun, told AFP.

“We are concentrating on two areas, in the north of Uruzgan province and in Zabul,” he said.

“We are sending people to suspected villages, suspected areas to try to get some information.”

Uruzgan is the province to the north of Kandahar, in central Afghanistan, with Zabul to its south-east.

If Omar is captured “we will immediately deliver him to the coalition forces,” Pashtun said. “This is our commitment.”

But the Afghan official said authorities did not know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

“We have no idea no idea if he is alive even, because we believe he hasn’t been any more in our area for a long time”

Despite several reported sightings of Mullah Omar since he was driven from his southern stronghold of Kandahar in early December, he has continued to elude capture.

Early this month, officials in Kandahar said Omar had been cornered in Helmand province’s Baghran district, and that talks for his surrender were under way.They later admitted he had evaded some 5,000 troops poised to flush him out, and fled with his supporters on motorbikes. The escape was the second staged by Omar, who is wanted by the United States.

The one-eyed cleric was believed to have slipped out of Kandahar last month with hundreds of his fighters after lengthy surrender negotiations with commanders of anti-Taliban forces besieging the city.—AFP