M A I N   N E W S

Osama’s sons arrested?

Quetta, March 7
A provincial minister in Pakistan’s south-west province of Baluchistan today said he had been informed that two sons of Osama bin Laden were captured in a joint US-Afghan-Pakistan operation.

“I am in constant touch with the security forces. I was informed by intelligence agencies that the reports coming across the border (from Afghanistan) are that two of Osama’s sons were caught and they were injured,” minister Sardar Sanaullah Zahri told reporters in the Baluch capital, Quetta.

There was no independent confirmation of the reports the minister said he had received.

From Washington, a US official denied the reports of the campute as “not true.”

“It’s not true,” said the US official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We have absolutely no information to substantiate that.”

ISLAMABAD: Two sons of Osama bin Laden were wounded and possibly arrested in an operation by US and Afghan troops in Afghanistan which killed at least nine suspected Al-Qaida members, a Pakistani official said on Friday.

The operation took place on Thursday in the Ribat area, where the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran meet, Mr Zehri, Home Minister of the western province of Baluchistan, told Reuters. “We have information that two sons of Osama bin Laden were injured,” he said. “The people killed belonged to the Al-Qaida.

“We have heard that they (the sons) may have been arrested. But our information may not be 100 per cent true.

Officers of Pakistan’s paramilitary Forntier Corps told Reuters that Pakistani forces had launched an operation on Thursday, also involving a few Americans, in pursuit of the Al-Qaida suspects in the Ribat region.

Mr Zehri said Pakistani forces did not take part in the raid on the Al-Qaida, which occurred on the Afghan side of the border. “It is an Afghan area,” he said.

Meanwhile Pakistan’s Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat on Friday denied reports cited by a provincial minister that two sons of Osama bin Laden had been arrested in a joint operation by Pakistani, Afghan and US forces in south-east Afghanistan near the Pakistani and Iranian borders.

“There is absolutely no truth in this report. There has been no arrest of this nature,” Mr Hayat told AFP, dismissing claims by Baluchistan province’s Home Minister Zehri. Agencies