Osama Hunt Gains Momentum
The hunt for Osama bin Laden has heated up dramatically this week as American and Pakistani forces are scouring the remote and rugged badlands that straddle the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Not since December 2001, when bin Laden was surrounded and under constant air attack in the mountains of Tora Bora, have U.S. officials been so optimistic about their chances of getting him, CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports.
That optimism stems from Saturday's arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the so-called brains of al Qaeda and the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
U.S. officials say Mohammed met with bin Laden as recently as last month. When Pakistani agents surprised Mohammed in his sleep last weekend, they also seized a large volume of material which contained the names and cell phone numbers of intermediaries through which Mohammed contacted bin Laden, giving American intelligence agents a trail they can now follow.
U.S. officials say the trail points to Pakistan's wild northwest frontier and to an area in southeastern Afghanistan just across the border, which is where they thought he had been hiding ever since making good his escape from Tora Bora.
At least two raids have been carried out in Pakistan based on information from Mohammed, a Pakistani intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. There were no major arrests from the raids, the official said.
Since Mohammed's arrest, joint Pakistani and U.S. forces have been searching for bin Laden and his son, Saad, along the 350-mile stretch of border from the Baluchistan town of Chaman to the Iranian border, a Pakistan military source said.
Villagers contacted in Dal Bandin, 170 miles south of the Baluchistan capital of Quetta, said two military aircraft landed at their small airstrip and American forces got off. There was no confirmation from the U.S. or Pakistani military.
Since the weekend, residents in Chaman said U.S. aircraft swarmed overhead, dropping Pashtu-language leaflets on both sides of the border reminding them of the $25 million reward for bin Laden.
U.S. special forces and Pakistani soldiers are also farther north along the border, trying to flush out Taliban and al Qaeda fugitives in South Waziristan, in the North West Frontier province.
Mohammed's meeting with bin Laden took place somewhere in Baluchistan or farther north along the border, a Pakistani intelligence official told The Associated Press.
The official was one of a team of Pakistani and CIA agents who interrogated Mohammed for hours after he was nabbed in a pre-dawn raid in Rawalpindi on Saturday.
The intelligence official quoted Mohammed as saying of bin Laden, "The sheik is a hero of Islam and I am his tiny servant. Life, family, money, everything can be sacrificed for the sheik." The official did not reveal what Mohammed and bin laden discussed.
Mohammed told his interrogators he didn't know bin Laden's exact whereabouts, but that he was in the remote border region.
On Monday, AP received similar information about bin Laden's supposed location from a former intelligence chief of the ousted Taliban regime.
In a telephone interview from Afghanistan's southern city of Kandahar, the former Taliban said bin Laden had been seen less than two months ago meeting with Taliban members in South Waziristan. His report could not be independently verified.
Several sources say bin Laden moves with only a few guards, changing locations nightly and never using satellite telephones that could be used to pinpoint his location.
Instead, he reportedly sends messages through intermediaries, according to another former Taliban interviewed by AP.
Western diplomats say it's intriguing that Mohammed was arrested in Rawalpindi, a city of 4 million near Islamabad that is home to army generals, top military officials and President Pervez Musharraf.
Mohammed was arrested at the house of Ahmed Abdul Qadus, an activist within Pakistan's oldest religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which has close links with the Pakistan's state InterServices Intelligence, or ISI.
Jamaat-e-Islami activists worked closely with Pakistan's intelligence service to help Afghan insurgents during the 1980s, when the United States bankrolled an anti-communist war in Afghanistan.
Arab and Pakistani sources have told AP that Mohammed may have been trying to raise money for terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.
A second al Qaeda suspect, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi, a Saudi national suspected of financing the Sept. 11 attacks, was arrested with Mohammed. Qadus was also detained.