Posted on 06/02/2004 11:06:39 AM PDT by areafiftyone
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan had Osama bin Laden "within reach" on at least two occasions, but were unable to prevent him slipping away, France's top general said Wednesday.
French chief of staff Gen. Henri Bentegeat, said the al-Qaida leader had evaded capture several times since 2002, but not recently. He didn't say where bin Laden had been tracked down, and refused to comment on whether French special forces operating in southern Afghanistan were involved.
"Several times the coalition has had Osama bin Laden directly within reach," Bentegeat told reporters during a visit to the Afghan capital. "But between locating a person and arresting them there is a gap tied to all the uncertainties of all operations of this kind."
A spokeswoman for the U.S. military in Kabul had no immediate comment on the general's remarks.
Bentegeat said several of bin Laden's top lieutenants also evaded capture. "At least two times they managed to escape," he said. "That's absolutely inevitable, normal in the conditions in which these kind of operations are carried out.
"I'm not saying there was an incident of this kind recently," he added. "To my knowledge, that's not the case."
Bentegeat made similar comments in an interview in March to France's Europe-1 radio station, saying bin Laden narrowly escaped capture by French troops in Afghanistan, perhaps several times. He did not specify when or where the escapes took place.
Some 200 French troops work with the 20,000-strong U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan in the drive to track holdouts of the former ruling Taliban regime and bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist group.
A door man, eh? How did they separate his lips from the knob?
I was thinking more of the uniform.
Yeah, but I was thinking more of the french.
LOL
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