Taliban: Bin Laden's Hiding in Afghanistan

Cohort offered to arrange meeting, says Pakistan inmate

By Rob Quinn, Newser Staff

Posted Dec 4, 2009 3:08 AM CST

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Taliban: Bin Laden's Hiding in Afghanistan — Taliban militants hold their weapons at a undisclosed location in Ghazni province, Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is hiding out in Ghanzi, according to a detainee. (AP Photo/Rahmatullah Naikzad)

A high-ranking Taliban member in Pakistani custody claims a cohort offered to arrange a meeting with Osama bin Laden earlier this year, and that the al-Qaeda leader is in eastern Afghanistan, not northern Pakistan as widely believed, the detainee told a BBC reporter. The inmate, who met with bin Laden numerous times before 9/11, says he spoke to a bin Laden contact from Afghanistan's Ganzi province, which is largely a no-go area for Afghan and coalition troops.

"If it's true—a big if—this is an extraordinary and important story," said a former CIA analyst. "Someone who has come forward and said, really for the first time, 'I met with Osama Bin Laden and I had the opportunity to meet him again in the recent past.'" The detainee's motives for talking are unclear, and Western interrogators have not been granted access to him.
(More Taliban stories.)

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