AFGHANISTAN: Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar is alive but Osama bin Laden is probably dead, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said yesterday in an interview one year after a US-led bombing campaign began in Afghanistan.
"Mullah Omar is alive and we know of that and we have come close to arresting him several times, but he has been able to escape," Mr Karzai told the CNN television network.
"It is difficult to get a man like that because nobody knows him by face. I believe he is most of the time in Afghanistan." Mullah Omar led the hardline Taliban militia which controlled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until their downfall late last year.
There were few sightings of the notoriously reclusive cleric even while he was in power. He conducted most of his business through a handful of trusted aides.
Mr Karzai said a question mark remained over the fate of bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
"We have come to believe that he probably is dead but still you never know, he might be alive," Mr Karzai said.
"The more we do not hear of him there is the likelihood he is dead or seriously injured somehere." He said the Taliban, whose support for bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network prompted the start of the coalition military campaign in Afghanistan on October 7th, 2001, was more or less a spent force.
"We do not see them as a danger," Mr Karzai said.