WASHINGTON, 25 September 2006 — Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, walked into the celebration of Saudi Arabia’s National Day in Washington D.C. on Saturday evening and immediately was asked the question of the day. “Is it true?” a Time reporter said. “Nope,” Hayden shot back, adding to the accumulating denials that Osama Bin Laden is dead.

About an hour before, the Saudi Embassy here had issued a statement saying it had “no evidence to support recent media reports that Osama Bin Laden is dead. Information that has been reported otherwise is purely speculative and cannot be independently verified.”

Adding weight to the rebuttal was Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Turki Al-Faisal, known for his intimate ties to Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, which he headed for 24 years before embarking on a diplomatic career in 2002.

During the Kingdom’s best-attended National Day celebration in Washington in years, Prince Turki Al-Faisal told reporters, “My understanding is that (Bin Laden) is alive and kicking. But I may be wrong.” The Saudi denials capped a day of intense speculation as politicians and counterterrorism experts expressed doubt that Bin Laden, who has eluded capture for more than five years, had met his end.

Worldwide, authorities remained skeptical over reports about Al-Qaeda’s elusive leader, after the mystery regarding the whereabouts of Bin Laden took a new twist this weekend when a French newspaper published a leaked French intelligence report suggesting he had died about a month ago. Following an instantaneous news hailstorm over the report, the governments of France, the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia dashed the report and urged against premature celebrations.

French President Jacques Chirac told reporters Bin Laden’s death “has not been confirmed in any way whatsoever and so I have no comment to make” and that he was surprised a confidential note had been published. France has launched a probe into the leak.

One French political scholar at the Saudi National Day reception Saturday night told Arab News: “Think about it. This is the sort of information that would be given to the Americans, not us.” And in the US, officials said they would try to clarify the reports, but warned that Bin Laden’s death would not be the end of global terrorism.

“No comment, no knowledge,” said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when asked about the French article by reporters in New York.

It is not the first time Bin Laden has been presumed dead. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf speculated that he died of kidney failure in 2002, unable to get treatment while on the run from American-led forces on the rugged border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The French foreign intelligence service report, published in the newspaper L’Est Republicain said some Gulf intelligence officials had become convinced that Bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan on Aug. 23.

“His geographic isolation, caused by his permanent fugitive status, made any medical care impossible,” the report said.

A report by Time magazine’s online service said Arab officials had received “multiple credible reports” over previous weeks that Bin Laden was seriously ill, with a “high probability” he was now dead.

“This is not a rumor,” Time quoted the source as saying.

A French security official quoted in the Los Angeles Times warned that the intelligence was based on a single source. “We consider it a source among other sources,” the official said.

US and Pakistani officials believe Bin Laden, 49, has been hiding along the Afghan-Pakistani border since the Taleban fell in 2001, Bin Laden is blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States and numerous terrorist attacks against American and Western interests.

He last appeared on video footage dellivered to the Arab television network Al-Jazeera in late October 2004 just days before the US presidential election. Five audiotapes or Internet messages attributed to him have been released in the Muslim world so far this year. He released a recording lamenting the death of Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, on June 29. “Whether or not Osama Bin Laden is dead, the overall global terrorist movement continues apace. Unfortunately, the global terrorist movement is now much bigger than Osama Bin Laden,” the State Department official said.

He warned that even if Bin Laden was dead, the threat from terrorism would continue.

“I think that it would be a boost to the global war against terrorism if they are true,” he said.

“But we shouldn’t take a great deal of comfort, because...Al-Qaeda is well structured as we’ve seen and delivering their brand of terrorism in different forms and in different countries.”

Meanwhile, a former governor of Kandahar, Mullah Malang, told Arab News from Quetta the story about Bin Laden’s death was baseless.

He said, “To my knowledge Al-Qaeda operatives have not been completely eliminated by the US forces in Afghanistan, particularly in the eastern region. Another Taleban commander said, “We heard rumors about Bin Laden’s death not this August but last August.”

— With input from Azhar Masood in Islamabad