LONDON, Nov 27: If Osama bin Laden really is hiding out in a cave in Afghanistan, as some Western experts believe, it could be in a complex in the White Mountains likened by one observer to a hotel.

According to Britain’s Independent daily, citing a witness who visited the system in eastern Afghanistan’s Tora Bora area six months ago, it has its own ventilation, electricity supply and natural protection.

It is so isolated and well-defended, buried 350 metres beneath the mountains, that it is practically immune to outside attack, and is filled with his fanatical followers, it added.

The paper quoted Hazarat Ali, a top local official in the new government in eastern Afghanistan, saying he was “70 per cent sure” Osama was there.

“It’s like a hotel, with doors on the left and the right,” the witness told the Independent.

“They have an electrical system which provides power for the caves, driven by water from the peaks of the mountains.

“The entrance is wide enough to drive a car inside. You walk for 15 metres until you reach a door made of wood.

“After the doorway it divides into branches.”

According to the paper, the witness described a lair housing up to 2,000 Arab and foreign fighters who were preparing to mount a guerrilla war.

Many more were reported to have retreated to the hide-out after the former ruling Taliban were ousted from the eastern city of Jalalabad nearly two weeks ago.

“It is completely surrounded by mountains, and they have to bring in their supplies by asses, camels and horses,” he said.

“They don’t need to burn coal because the rooms have electricity, but there is a kind of (ventilation) station which picks up the smoke and carries it out to the sky.

“They have all kinds of winter clothes, so they can go anywhere.”

“There are small rooms and big rooms, and the wall and floor are cemented. You can only make out what they really are because you can see the sharp rock in the ceiling.”

He said the entrance was hidden by trees, reachable only by foot, and that bin Laden had warned off local people from the complex on pain of death.

Ali was quoted in Sunday’s New York Times as saying that bin Laden had been spotted in recent days at Tora Bora.

He said bin Laden was moving at night on horseback and sleeping in caves. However Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of the Northern Alliance now in power in Kabul, said on Monday that Oosama and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar were together and “contained” in or around the militia’s southern citadel of Kandahar.—AFP