Taliban chief, Osama flee to Pakistan: Iranian radio
AFP
(Tehran, November 16)
hindustantimes.com
Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11 attacks on the United States, fled on Friday to an autonomous border area of Pakistan, an Iranian radio station reported.
"Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden have almost certainly fled Afghanistan to Manatiq e-Azad, in order to save their lives," reported the Iranian radio station in the northeastern city of Mashhad.
The two men headed by road into the region southwest of Peshawar, effectively outside the control of the Pakistani government and dominated by tribal elements heavily sympathetic to bin Laden and the fundamentalist Taliban, the radio said.
The station, which broadcasts in Dari, an Afghan tongue similar to Iran's Farsi, attributed the details to an informed Afghan source contacted by telephone.
The Mashhad station serves Iran's two million-strong Afghan community and also broadcasts to neighbouring Afghanistan.
US and British special forces have been dispatched on the ground in Afghanistan to hunt out bin Laden, in revenge for the September 11 attacks.
Russia dismissed on Thursday a rumour that bin Laden had fled to its breakaway republic of Chechnya.
Meanwhile, the state-run Iranian daily Jam-e-Jam had reported that bin Laden and Mullah Omar had fled to Pakistani-occupied Kashmir. |
