A Pakistan official said yesterday that two sons of Osama bin Laden were wounded and possibly arrested in an operation by US and Afghan troops in Afghanistan that killed at least nine suspected al-Qaeda men.
But the governor of the Afghan province where the action was reported to have taken place on Thursday swiftly denied there had been any arrests, clouding an already confused picture.
And a spokesman for the US military in Afghanistan denied that US troops were in the area and said it had no information about the capture of sons of the al-Qaeda leader.
The White House also cast doubt on the reports. "We have no information to substantiate that report," White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer told reporters. But he said it was "only a matter of time" before bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were found.
Mr Abdul Karim Barawi, governor of the Afghan province of Nimroz, told Reuters that US troops were present in the Ribat region of his western province bordering Iran and Pakistan.
"Their choppers hover on and off, but I totally reject the report made by the Pakistani Minister about the arrest of two of [bin Laden's\] sons," he said.
Earlier, Mr Sardar Sanaullah Zehri, Home Minister of the western Pakistani province of Baluchistan, told Reuters: "We have information that two sons of Osama bin Laden were injured. The people killed belonged to al-Qaeda.
"We have heard that they [the sons\] may have been arrested. But our information may not be 100 per cent true," he said.
The Minister, speaking during a visit to the southern port city of Karachi, said he had no information that bin Laden had been in the Ribat area at the time of the raid.
US officials said this week they believed bin Laden was in the rugged tribal borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yousufzai, who interviewed bin Laden in 1998, he then had 13 children.
Yesterday's reports follow the arrest last weekend of suspected September 11th mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which raised hopes that interrogators could get leads on bin Laden's whereabouts.
The world's most wanted man has evaded US forces since a US bombing campaign against al-Qaeda and forces of the ousted Taliban government in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Officers of Pakistan's Frontier Corps said Pakistani and some US forces had also been pursuing al-Qaeda suspects in the part of the Ribat district on the Pakistani side of the border.
But Mr Zehri said the operation had been inside Afghanistan.
Ribat, a sandy desert region, straddles the border about 900 km south-west of the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Sgt Richard Breach, a public affairs officer at the US military headquarters at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, said the US-led coalition had no troops in the area where bin Laden's sons were reportedly captured. "And we have no information about them being captured," he said.
A US official in Washington also said: "We don't have any information to substantiate that."
In Washington, President Bush warned bin Laden and his top aides yesterday that they had nowhere to hide.
"The President's message to all al-Qaeda, whether it's Osama bin Laden or any of his other lieutenants, to all al-Qaeda, is there is no place to hide," White House spokesman Mr Fleischer said.
"They will be caught whatever length of time it takes."
Residents in Baluchistan province said leaflets were dropped there on Thursday offering rewards for the capture of bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. But Pakistani and US officials rejected reports that a new operation was under way targeting bin Laden.
"International media is creating a panic all over the country that we are going to catch him in two days or three days. This is totally wrong," Pakistan's Information Minister, Mr Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, said. - (Reuters)