Daily News & Analysis
      
 
LAHORE, Sep 24: Pakistani intelligence circles have strongly refuted a French newspaper report claiming that al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden had died of typhoid in the country some time between August 23 and September 4 this year.

“Based on the information gleaned from several arrested al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, we can say with authority that Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri and the former Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar are very much alive and in good health,” said a senior intelligence official in Rawalpindi.

“We are sure that bin Laden is hiding somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said.  “We believe that his deputy sometimes moves back and forth between the two with the help of Mullah Omar and his associates.”

 The intelligence official said that even the American intelligence sleuths stationed in Pakistan are convinced that the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy are well and hiding somewhere on the Pak-Afghan border. “And they are trying to hunt him down,” the official said.

He said that had Osama been dead - especially, as recently as August - the news would have been broken by none other than the Pakistan president during his ongoing US visit. General Pervez Musharraf has everything to gain by making the news public. “General Musharraf knows quite well how much the news of Osama’s death would please President Bush at this stage,” the official said.

Intelligence sources pointed out that bin Laden was last seen on a video on the Al Jazeera television channel on January 21, 2006. A recording from Osama, his first message for over a year, was aimed at quashing rumours of his death and warning the Western world that its most wanted man remained a major threat.

Three months later, on April 25, 2006, Osama resurfaced with an audio-taped address. There was nothing new in his message; the real objective was to indicate that he was alive, still the leader of al-Qaeda, and a main player in world politics.

Intelligence officials say that rumours about bin Laden suffering from kidney-related afflictions have been rampant for years. A persistent rumour suggests that bin Laden received treatment for his damaged kidneys at the American Hospital in Dubai in 2001, arriving on July 4 and leaving on July 14.

Among those with him, it is said, was Ayman Zawahiri, who as well as being his personal physician is al-Qaeda’s second-in-command. However, a few days before the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden himself, in a November 2001 interview with a Pakistani paper, denied reports that he had been hospitalised. “My kidneys are all right,” he had said.

As things stand, nobody is certain about bin Laden’s whereabouts. Speculations, however, persist about his state of health, his plans for the future and his control over the supposedly defunct al-Qaeda.