ISLAMABAD, 9 March 2003 — Pakistani and US hunters zeroed in yesterday on the junction of the Afghan, Iranian and Pakistani borders for Osama Bin Laden’s sons and his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri, security officials said.
“The triangle of the borders is the focus of the hunt,” a senior security official familiar with the search operation said.
Pakistani troops guided by US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) experts used helicopters and ground forces to scour roughly 400 square kilometers of rugged mountains and inhospitable desert at the triangular border region, he said.
The search for Bin Laden meanwhile was focussed on Pakistan’s northwest border with Afghanistan, in the tribal border belt and district of Chitral north of the tribal zone, officials said.
The hunt has gained new impetus since the March 1 capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States and believed to be Al-Qaeda’s third most senior figure. “We are 90 percent certain he is alive but we are still in the dark about his exact whereabouts,” a senior security official familiar with Sheikh Mohammed’s interrogations said.
Evidence found on Mohammed, including data and letters written in code, indicated that Ayman was holed up in border areas of Baluchistan. “Analysis of the documents suggested Al-Zawahiri was alive and somewhere in Baluchistan,” another security official closely involved in investigations said.
Baluchistan borders Iran to its west and Afghanistan to its north and northwest and touches the Arabian Sea in its south. It covers some 43 percent of Pakistan’s land mass. Joint hunt teams were also searching other pockets of Baluchistan’s 760-km western border with Iran and the province’s 1,600-km northwestern border with Afghanistan.
The pockets included a region around the coastal town of Jiwani, 30 km east of the Iranian frontier and 50 km west of the port of Gwadar. They were also combing the northwest Baluchistan border districts of Chagai, facing Afghanistan’s southwestern Nimroz province, and Dalbandin.
Nimroz governor Abdul Karim Barohi said he was unaware of any operation either by Afghan or US forces in his province. “In the Ribat area there are US forces who are working together with Afghan forces, we haven’t had such a report of an operation either by Afghan forces or US operations.”
Col. Roger King, US military spokesman at Bagram air base north of the Afghan capital Kabul, did not deny there may be a US presence in Nimroz. He said, however, he was unable to comment on any possible CIA presence, only comment on the activities of the Combined Joint Task Force 180 (CJTF180), or the international military coalition.
“CJTF 180 does not have forces operating in the area of Ribat at this time,” King said.
Dalbandin is the second largest of at least four Pakistani air bases and airstrips used by US-led coalition troops for the past 18 months to crush and hunt down Al-Qaeda and Taleban remnants in Afghanistan.
A security official familiar with Baluch border areas said the terrain was “extremely impassable” at several points.
Army sources said at least three UH2H search helicopters were engaged in the intensive hunt that began Wednesday.
A senior government official in Islamabad said on condition of anonymity that the ground search would continue “until we are able to make sure that there are no Al-Qaeda men hiding in the area.”
