Pakistan rejects report about Osama’s presence

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

KABUL: Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is living comfortably in a house in north- west Pakistan close to his deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri, CNN on Monday quoted a Nato official as saying.

Bin Laden is being protected by local people and “some members of the Pakistani intelligence services,” the television network said.

It also said that the Al Qaeda number two, the Egyptian-born Zawahiri, was living close to him.“Nobody in Al Qaeda is living in a cave,” the unnamed senior Nato official is quoted as saying.

Bin Laden is likely to have moved around an area ranging from the mountains of Chitral near the Chinese border to the Kurram valley near Afghanistan’s Tora Bora in recent years, CNN reported the official as saying.

“The official also confirmed the US assessment that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, has moved between the cities of Quetta and Karachi in Pakistan over the last several months,” said the report on CNN’s website.

Report rejected

Pakistani authorities rejected the report. “I categorically deny the report about the presence of Osama bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri or even Mullah Omar in Pakistan,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told reporters on Monday.

“Bin Laden... and all other terrorists are anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan and hired assassins. If we have any information we will take action against them,” he said.

A foreign ministry official, talking to AFP, dismissed the CNN report as “baseless” that has been “put out to malign Pakistan”.

A Nato spokesman in Kabul said the alliance had no immediate comment.