WASHINGTON, March 11: A CIA official on Tuesday termed “utterly false” a report claiming the spy agency is holding two sons, aged seven and nine, of suspected Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed at a secret location in the United States.

The report was first published in Britain’s Telegraph and later reproduced by several newspapers in the US and elsewhere.

CIA Spokesman Tom Crispell told the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations that the CIA was not holding the children in the United States or anywhere else, and no third party was holding the children on the agency’s behalf.