Osama alive and in charge

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan as recently as last month and met there with his chief operational lieutenant, Pakistani security officials said Wednesday.

The officials said material seized Saturday during the arrest of the lieutenant, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, showed that Mohammed met with bin Laden sometime in February, possibly in Rawalpindi, the city adjacent to Islamabad where Mohammed was discovered on Saturday.

"There is now no doubt that he is alive and well," a senior Pakistani government official said of bin Laden in an interview. "We have documents that show he is alive and in this region."

Officials in Washington said on Wednesday that they knew of no specific information that would show the two men had recently met. But they saw a meeting between the terrorist leader and his main lieutenant as plausible and said it would suggest not only that bin Laden remained in charge of al-Qaida but also that planning was under way for a major attack.

Bin Laden has eluded a worldwide manhunt for more than a year. American authorities have been uncertain of his location since the American bombing of his hideout in Tora Bora, a mountainous region of Afghanistan, in late 2001 -- though he is believed to have escaped the attack. American intelligence officials have ascribed two recently released audiotapes to bin Laden, but firm proof of his survival has remained inconclusive.

The senior Pakistani official said the information that bin Laden and Mohammed met in February came from documents, CD-ROMs and a computer discovered at the time of Mohammed's arrest.

In a separate interview, a second Pakistani official said that Mohammed had told his captors during the raid of meeting with bin Laden a month ago at a site that Mohammed refused to specify.

"Praise be to Allah, our sheikh is alive," the official quoted Mohammed as saying. "I met him only one month ago."

The official said Mohammed was interrogated for several hours by both Pakistani agents and CIA agents before being handed over to U.S. authorities and taken out of the country to an undisclosed location.

In what appeared to corroborate Mohammed's information, the Associated Press received similar information on Monday from a former Taliban intelligence chief. In a telephone interview from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, the former intelligence chief said bin Laden was seen in South Waziristan in Baluchistan province less than two months ago.

Bin Laden was meeting with Taliban members, he said. His report could not be independently verified, but both U.S. Special Forces and Pakistani soldiers are in South Waziristan trying to flush out fugitive Taliban and al-Qaida members.

Several sources say that bin Laden moves with only a small number of guards, changing his location nightly, never using satellite telephones. Instead he reportedly sends messages through intermediaries to a selected person who makes telephone calls on his behalf, according to former Taliban members interviewed by the Associated Press in Pakistan's remote tribal regions.

In the past, bin Laden's subordinates have sought him out for meetings in which they obtained his approval of terrorist actions and were given personal statements of support -- especially in "martyrdom operations."

Mohammed was arrested with Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who Western intelligence officials say helped arrange the financing for the Sept. 11 plot. American authorities have sought to detain senior leaders of al-Qaida outside the United States as enemy combatants, a status that denies them access to American criminal courts.

Since Mohammed's arrest, American officials have said he may shed light on bin Laden's whereabouts as well as on impending al-Qaida attacks worldwide.

On Wednesday they confirmed that information about bin Laden was found in the material seized during the arrest.

The officials also said Mohammed had begun to cooperate with his captors, although it was not clear whether he had given up any significant information about bin Laden, other al-Qaida leaders or terror strikes being planned inside the United States or elsewhere.

Officials are hoping that the items found at the house in Rawalpindi will help provide information on those subjects. Material seized in the raid has been shipped in boxes to Washington, where investigators are poring over it. Experts consulting in the case include translators, computer specialists, fingerprint examiners and other scientific analysts.

Among the items sent to Washington were cell phones and address books with the names, addresses and phone numbers of people inside the United States and overseas who are now being urgently sought by the FBI and the security services of other countries, according to Americans familiar with the material.

Much more material was found in the raid than authorities have been willing to acknowledge in public. American officials said that even though the processing of documents had just begun, they were optimistic that it would lead to the disruption of terror plots and help in the capture of other al-Qaida leaders.

It has long been suspected that bin Laden is hiding in the rugged tribal regions that straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Contributing: Associated Press.

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