For what would have been a massive scoop, it began in unspectacular fashion. During a telephone interview with a Tehran radio station yesterday, a Pakistani political commentator dropped, almost as an aside, the earthshattering bombshell that Osama bin Laden had been captured.
Murtaza Poya, deputy leader of the Islamic Awami Tahrik party, confidently informed the station that Pakistani intelligence agents and US troops had picked up Bin Laden inside Pakistan.
Unfortunately, Poya’s qualifications for giving the interview rested more on his fluent Farsi than his knowledge of the hunt for the world’s most wanted man. With the Pakistani authorities rushing to kill off any suggestion that Bin Laden was within their borders, let alone had been caught, journalists there quickly established that the ”exclusive” was as reliable as recent sightings of Elvis or Shergar.
But in an extraordinary example of the jumpiness pervading the world’s newsrooms, the rumour was racing around the globe within minutes.
First it was picked up by the BBC’s monitoring service in Caversham and relayed straight to the corporation’s news headquarters in London. Just before noon, BBC News 24 broadcast a newsflash about the claims, quoting unconfirmed reports from Iranian radio.
Shortly afterwards, Andrew Neil, who was on air on BBC2 presenting his Daily Politics programme, announced — viewers could almost sense his hands trembling — that Iranian radio was claiming that Bin Laden was in custody. US news organisations began beaming similar alerts.
By lunchtime, journalists were bombarding government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic for confirmation. They were to be disappointed. Pressed for a response during an unrelated press conference in London, the home secretary, David Blunkett, dismissed Poya’s claim: ”It’s totally unconfirmed. There have been several reports of this sort.”
Washington was also categoric. ”We have absolutely no information to substantiate that,” a CIA representative, Bill Harlow, told reporters. The BBC and CNN began carrying the denials shortly after 1pm.
But last night Poya was sticking to his claims. ”He is in the custody of those who were chasing him and the announcement to that effect will be made between March 17 and 18 when the war in Iraq is expected to start,” he told the Associated Press. – Guardian Unlimited Â