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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Two sons of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) were wounded and possibly arrested in an operation by U.S. and Afghan troops in Afghanistan (news - web sites) which killed at least nine suspected al Qaeda members, a Pakistani official said on Friday.
The operation took place on Thursday in the Ribat area, where the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran meet, Sardar Sanaullah Zehri, home minister of the western province of Baluchistan, told Reuters.
"We have information that two sons of Osama bin Laden were injured," he said. "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 percent true."
The minister said he had no information that bin Laden had been in the area at the time of the raid.
A U.S. official in Washington could not immediately confirm or deny the report of bin Laden's sons' capture. "We don't have any information to substantiate that," he said.
Officers of Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps told Reuters that Pakistani forces had launched an operation on Thursday, also involving a few Americans, in pursuit of al Qaeda suspects in the Ribat region.
It came after Pakistani officials said they had arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a top al Qaeda figure suspected of masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States, last weekend.
Zehri said Pakistani forces did not take part in the raid on al Qaeda, which occurred on the Afghan side of the border.
"It is an Afghan area," he said.