That's him! bin Laden
is in LA producing
Britney's new album!
Posted on 04/29/2005 7:37:13 AM PDT by dead
A posting on an Islamist Web site stirred speculation over the fate of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and prompted a flurry of denials on Friday that the world's most wanted man is dead.
The entry on the http://www.albawaba.com Web site began by saying there was news bin Laden had died but went on to say that the fugitive militant could die at any time and Muslims should be prepared.
The unidentified author appeared to be trying to attract readers to his posting with a headline reporting bin Laden's death.
Yasser al-Siri, an Egyptian dissident who ran the Islamic Observation Centre in Britain and who is considered close to al Qaeda, told the Al Sharq al Awsat newspaper that bin Laden is alive.
Security sources in Pakistan, often said to be the most likely hiding place for the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, said they had no recent information about either bin Laden's health or his whereabouts.
Western diplomats in Islamabad said they would have heard cheering in their embassies by now if there had been any truth in the reports apparently circulating on more than one Middle East Web site.
"The reports of his death seem somewhat premature - though we hope, of course, that it won't be long," a Western diplomat in Islamabad said.
This month, August Hanning, the head of Germany's BND foreign intelligence service, told a security conference that bin Laden had managed to disappear to Pakistan after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and remained hidden there "to this day".
Western intelligence officials usually say they believe bin Laden is holed up somewhere in the mountainous, inaccessible frontier region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, without specifying which side of the border.
In mid-March, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, a strong ally in the US-led war on terrorism, told the BBC that interrogations of captured al Qaeda members and electronic surveillance had led Pakistani security forces to believe they "knew roughly the area where he possibly could be ... maybe about 10 months ago".
But Musharraf said the trail had since gone cold.
The most recent video of the tall, gaunt, grey-bearded bin Laden appeared on Oct. 30, four days before the US election.
Looking like an Islamic cleric in a turban and brown cloak, the Saudi-born militant derided President George W. Bush and warned of a new Sept. 11-style attack.
There has long been speculation that bin Laden suffers from a serious kidney ailment, but diplomats and intelligence officials say they have heard no updates on his condition for some time.
Reuters
FACT: Bin Ladan is either already dead or will be dead.
That's him! bin Laden
is in LA producing
Britney's new album!
Rumormonger!!!
You're the world's most wanted man??? WOW!!!!
lol
Heisenburg's Cat in the Box paradox: simultaneously alive and dead.
Schrodinger
Isn't Osama on a cruise with Arafat?
You can't imagine
how much PEOPLE magazine
wants a pic of dead!
Now that Jen and Brad
have gone splitsville, magazines
need a hot couple!
We "invaded" Afghanistan with a few hundred men?
Gosh, even us anti-terrorist types would have to feel a twinge of pity for him if that were true.
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