WASHINGTON, April 20: Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden operates in an increasingly narrow area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, US spy chief John Negroponte claimed in an interview aired on Thursday.

“I think he’s operating from a narrower and narrower corner of space in that Pakistan-Afghanistan border area,” Negroponte told NBC television’s “Today Show.”

Asked what worried him most, he replied: “It’s the international terrorists. It’s Al Qaeda. What is it we don’t know?”

The former ambassador to Iraq oversees 16 spy agencies — including the CIA — as the first director of national intelligence, a post set up as part of an effort to reform counter-terrorism efforts after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.

Negroponte has come under criticism recently from lawmakers in Congress over his performance, but he told the US television network that progress had been made since the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

“We’re really on this case 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And in that sense, I think we are certainly safer than we were before 9/11,” he said.

In 2001, US and Afghan forces tracked bin Laden in Tora Bora in Afghanistan but failed to capture him.—AFP