ISLAMABAD, 16 March 2005 — Pakistani forces hunting Osama Bin Laden lost track of the Al-Qaeda leader after coming close to discovering his whereabouts several months ago, President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview.
He told the BBC late Monday that intelligence agencies had indications eight to 10 months ago about the whereabouts of Bin Laden but then the trail went cold.
“There have been occasions where, through interrogation of those who have been captured, the Al-Qaeda members who were apprehended there, and through technical means, there was a time when the dragnet had closed,” Musharraf said. “We thought we knew roughly the area where he possibly could be. That was, I think ... not very long (ago), maybe eight to 10 months back,” said Musharraf, who is a close ally in the US-led war against terrorism.
Musharraf said the net had been closing on the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, but he was able to flee.
The Pakistani leader said his forces got their clearest trace of Bin Laden when they were operating in the Pakistani tribal areas along the Afghan border last year, the period when they claimed to have killed some 300 foreign and local Al-Qaeda-linked militants.
But since then, Musharraf said, the security forces had seen no sign that the Al-Qaeda leader or his associates were in the area. “They can move and then you lose contact,” he said.
In May and July 2004 Pakistan also rounded up scores of Al-Qaeda operatives including some key figures, who had taken shelter in other parts of the country after fleeing tribal sanctuaries.
Notable among these were Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian indicted in the 1998 twin bombings of US embassies in Africa, and a Pakistani computer expert Naeem Noor Khan, thought to have been planning a series of attacks in Britain and the United States.
Security officials have told AFP that Ghailani had received messages from Bin Laden as late as 2003.
