Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is alive and well, a source in Afghanistan’s militant Taliban movement told al-Arabiya news channel on Tuesday, denying recent reports of his death or illness.
”The [Taliban] movement has checked the reports [of bin Laden’s death]. The story is false. Bin Laden is alive,” an unnamed official in the movement told the channel’s office in Islamabad.
The Dubai-based station said that the source, who phoned it’s Pakistan office, denied previous reports claiming that the United States’s most-wanted man had died.
A French intelligence memo, first published on Saturday in a French newspaper, claimed that Saudi intelligence concluded that bin Laden succumbed to typhoid fever sometime between August 23 and September 4 while in hiding in Pakistan.
French President Jacques Chirac as well as US, Pakistani and Afghan officials distanced themselves from the report, saying that it could not be confirmed. – Sapa-AFP