New York | Sunday
THE US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) started sending teams to Afghanistan three years ago in a bid to convince opposition forces to capture and maybe kill terror suspect Osama bin Laden, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
It said the CIA officers tried to work with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who was killed two days before the September 11 attacks on US targets which Washington believes were masterminded by bin Laden.
The CIA believes Massoud was killed by members of bin Laden’s organisation.
The US campaign against bin Laden intensified after the August 1998 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa, the New York Times said.
Following the bombings, US forces fired missiles at what they said was a training camp of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group.
The paper said the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants in Al-Qaeda, the terrorist network he leads from his sanctuary in Afghanistan, has now to ‘escalated to wartime levels’.
Earlier this month, former US president Bill Clinton admitted that he had ordered bin Laden’s capture and possible assassination after the 1998 bombings.
Clinton said that his administration also began training commandos for a possible ground assault targeted at bin Laden, but that adequate intelligence and support from key international governments was lacking.
The newspaper added that the Clinton administration lawyers had determined that the United States could legitimately seek to kill Bin Laden and his lieutenants despite the presidential ban on assassinations, according to current and former American officials.Sunday Express who was arrested near the eastern city of Jalalabad may be a spy, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said on Sunday.
Yvonne Ridley (41) was dressed in the all enveloping Afghan burqa, which flows almost to the ground and has a mesh over the eyes, when she was detained with her two guides near Jalalabad, about 15 km from the Pakistan border, AIP said.
The reporter was not carrying a passport and had entered the country illegally, AIP quoted an official in Jalalabad as saying.
The Taliban sent a special investigating team from Kabul to join the interrogation to determine whether Ridley was a reporter, AIP said.
”What we want to find out is whether this woman is really a journalist or working for some intelligence agency,” AIP quoted a Taliban official as saying.
”She is well. She wants to eat four or five times a day, she wants cigarettes and fresh clothes and we are providing everything to her,” the Taliban official said.
”She is not detained in a room but in a house and walks around in the house and in the courtyard,” he said.
In other developments, reports that three US commandos and two Afghans with US citizenship have been arrested in western Afghanistan are ”inaccurate,” said an administration official, who asked not to be named.
Qatar’s Al-Jazeera television reported on Saturday that three members of the US ”special forces” had been captured in western Afghanistan, countering a denial by the Taliban.
Al-Jazeera’s correspondent in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar, Ahmad Zaidan, said in a live broadcast that ”three members of the US ‘special forces’ and two Afghans holding US citizenship were captured by the Al-Qaeda organization in Helman, near the border with Iran.”
”The report is inaccurate,” the US administration official said.
Earlier a US Defence Department spokesman refused to comment on the report.
”We’re not going to get into the habit of commenting on every story that comes out of that region,” the representative said. ”It’s a slippery slope once we start getting into that habit.”
– Reuters, AFP