ISLAMABAD, 14 September 2003 — Pakistan has set up an elite military force to hunt down Taleban and Al-Qaeda fugitives in the country’s remote tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, the president was quoted as saying yesterday.
But President Gen. Pervez Musharraf dismissed reports that an operation by the new commando force last weekend in the border regions of northwestern Pakistan was a hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
Speculation over the Al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts has grown after video images of him and his No. 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, hiking on a mountainside were broadcast by the Arabic satellite network Al-Jazeera on the eve of the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States.
The CIA said Friday it was impossible to determine when the tape was made.
Some Al-Qaeda and Taleban holdouts are still believed to be sheltering in the Pakistani tribal regions at the border, after fleeing the US-led bombing in Afghanistan that ousted the hard-line Taleban regime in late 2001 for harboring Bin Laden and his followers.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has detained a commander of the Taleban militia as he tried to cross the border into Pakistan from Afghanistan, a Pakistani security official said yesterday.
Mohammd Omar, a close aide of the former Taleban governor of Kandahar province, Mullah Mohammad Hasan Rehmani, was arrested by Pakistani authorities near the southwestern border town of Chaman on Friday, said the Border Security Force official.
