One Day After News of Their Escape Iran Denies Ever Holding Bin Laden's Son, Top Lieutenants
August 14, 2003
AFP
IranMania
TEHRAN -- Iran Thursday denied that it had ever held al-Qaeda leader Osama's bin Laden's son or two principal lieutenants after an Arabic daily charged that the trio were being allowed to slip out of the country.
A foreign ministry official told the Iranian Student News Agency that longstanding reports that Saad bin Laden and al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri and number three Saif al-Adel had been detained in Iran were untrue.
He strongly denied Wednesday's report by the London-based Asharq al-Aswat daily that Zawahiri might already have slipped across the border into Afghanistan or Pakistan with the help of elements of the hardline Revolutionary Guard and that Adel and bin Laden junior were trying to follow him.
"The individuals named by Asharq al-Awsat have never been arrested in Iran and so the allegation that they have left Iran is completely meaningless," the official told ISNA.
"All al-Qaeda members who were arrested in Iran remain in custody."
It is the first time that Iran has broken its silence about the identity of the al-Qaeda leaders it is holding. Previously Iranian officials had said only that they had arrested "important and less important members" of the Islamic militant network since the US-led war in neighbouring Afghanistan in late 2001.
Iran has come under immense US pressure to hand over its al-Qaeda captives amid charges that members of the group working out of Iran had a hand in triple suicide attacks that killed 35 people in Saudi Arabia in May.
The Islamic regime has said that it will try, extradite or deport all its captives, but Wednesday ruled out giving US investigators permission to question them.
Tehran-based diplomats say the regime's plans to dispose of its al-Qaeda prisoners have been complicated by the fact that many have been stripped of their original nationality and therefore cannot be extradited.
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