The arrest raised hopes that interrogators could get leads on the location of the world’s most-wanted man who has evaded U.S. forces since surviving a massive U.S. bombing campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan in late 2001.

Thousands of U.S. troops have been deployed in Afghanistan for more than a year, concentrating their activities in the Pakistan border region in the hunt for bin Laden.

‘‘He wouldn’t be hiding alone or with one person...he seems to be alive,’’ the Pakistani president, who seized power in a coup in1999, told CNN in an interview broadcast today.

‘‘He would be moving with a large number of bodyguards,’’ he said. ‘‘He can’t be in Pakistan.’’

General Musharraf said Pakistani security agencies were onto Sheikh Mohammed for almost a month before arresting him last Saturday and agents were following up leads on other al Qaeda members.

‘‘Our intelligence organisations are active all over the country and they are very actively involved in tracking down any leads that we get,’’ he said.

‘‘They are actively involved also in the northern areas, in the tribal areas,’’ General Musharraf said.

U.S. officials said this week they believed bin Laden was hiding in the rugged tribal borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Documents seized in the arrest of Mohammed suggested bin Laden was alive and that the two had been in contact, a senior Pakistani security official said yesterday.

He said Pakistani security forces had intensified operations in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, where several al Qaeda and Taliban militants have been arrested in the past.

General Musharraf told CNN that Mohammed had been giving ‘’varying statements’’ about his contacts with bin Laden.

‘‘But this is preliminary investigation. I think more will follow when a detailed investigation is done.’’

The security official said the documents found at a house in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi where the authorities say Mohammed was arrested, provided an important insight into al Qaeda.

He did not give details on what the documents contained to suggest bin Laden was still alive, but said there were other indications the al Qaeda leader had survived the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan in 2001.

He said one indication came from an audio tape purportedly from Bin Laden that had been aired recently by the Qatar-based Arabic-language al-Jazeera television station. Pakistan said this week it had handed Mohammed over to the US custody and that he was probably in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told a press conference yesterday officials had seized weapons, computer discs and papers during the raid that netted Mohammed but said there had been no confirmation he had physically met bin Laden recently.