Bin Laden Could Be Dead, Whereabouts Unknown: Zardari

Bin Laden could be dead, whereabouts unknown: Zardari

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...042700699.html

Monday, April 27, 2009; 5:52 AM

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari said on Monday that the whereabouts of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden remained a mystery and there was a suspicion that he could be dead.

Speaking to international media, Zardari said U.S. officials had told him that they had no trace of the al Qaeda chief, although they habitually say he is most likely in Pakistan.

Pakistan's own intelligence agencies were no wiser, either, Zardari said.

"There is no news," the president said. "They obviously feel that he does not exist anymore but that's not confirmed, we can't confirm that."

Al Jazeera aired excerpts of an audio recording in March in which the speaker's voice sounded like earlier messages from bin Laden, who has eluded all efforts to catch him since al Qaeda carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Bin Laden, if he is still alive, turned 52 on March 10, but he is known to suffer from ill-health.

There have been reports that he had died of natural causes in the past, but they have never been corroborated, and security analysts believe intelligence agencies monitoring jihadi websites on the Internet would have picked up some chatter.

Pak intelligence believes Osama is dead: Zardari

http://www.geo.tv/4-27-2009/40810.htm

4/27/2009

ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari said Monday that Pakistani intelligence believes Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead but acknowledged they had no evidence.

"The Americans tell me they don't know, and they are much more equipped than us to trace him. And our own intelligence services obviously think that he does not exist any more, that he is dead," Zardari told reporters.

"But there is no evidence, you cannot take that as a fact," he said. "We are between facts and fiction."

Zardari was responding to reports that Pakistani Taliban in the troubled Swat valley have said they would welcome bin Laden if he wants to visit the former Pakistani hill resort which is now in the hands of Taliban.

"The question is whether he is alive or dead. There is no trace of him," the president said.

Pakistani president: Osama bin Laden is dead

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/05/...laden-is-dead/

BY DAVID EDWARDS AND JEREMY GANTZ
Published: May 10, 2009

Two weeks ago, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zadari suggested that Osama bin Laden might be dead, saying that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agencies had been unable to detect any sign of the world’s most wanted man since an audio recording of his voice was released in March.

Sunday morning, Zadari went further: “I don’t think he’s alive,” the president told NBC’s David Gregory. “I have a strong feeling and reason to believe that.” Zadari continued: “I have asked my counterparts in the American intelligence services and they haven’t heard [from] him in seven years.”

The CIA has not confirmed that the voice purporting to be bin Laden in the March recording was in fact bin Laden. U.S. officials have claimed that bin Laden could be hiding in the mountainous region along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Just before saying that he believes bin Laden is dead, Zadari told Gregory that “You have been looking [in Afghanistan] for eight years, you tell me. You lost him in Torah Borah, I didn’t.”

But Pakistan is still part of the worldwide “lookout brigade” for the alleged terrorism mastermind, Zadari said.

This video is from NBC’s Meet the Press, broadcast May 10, 2009.

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