Pakistan may have bin Laden deputy surrounded

1.00pm - UPDATE



WANA, Pakistan - Pakistani troops may have cornered Osama bin Laden's number two during a major battle on the wild Afghan frontier on Thursday, top officials said.

A senior government official in Islamabad told Reuters that Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's right-hand man in the Islamist network al Qaeda, may be surrounded.

Another official said the trapped leader was not bin Laden, the Western world's most wanted man.

President Pervez Musharraf told CNN that the ferocity of the resistance his forces had met led generals to believe they were shielding a "high-value target."

Al Qaeda fighters previously had been melting away before a Pakistani offensive of recent days but were now defending a hilltop mud fort, officials said.

"A pitched battle is going on there. The way these people are resisting, we think there is someone important over there," one official said. "We think al-Zawahri may be holed up there."

A Pakistani intelligence source said he could not rule out calling in air strikes after daybreak if resistance continued.

"The militants appear to be well dug in, they're very well prepared and they're determined to fight till the last," said Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan.

Troops sealed off the area around the village of Kaloosha in the northern area of Waziristan. Residents contacted from the regional center of Wana heard artillery and sporadic rifle fire and helicopters and saw columns of smoke snaking into the sky.

Security officials said six Pakistani soldiers were killed on Thursday after 26 soldiers and 24 suspected militants, including some foreigners, died in fighting in the area on Tuesday. There was no word on new militant deaths.

"It is possible the operation may continue for a day or two," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said on GEO private television.

Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Pakistan on Thursday to assure it of military support, confirming General Musharraf's government as a key Muslim ally against al Qaeda.

US forces have also been involved in days of fighting against hundreds of suspected foreign al Qaeda fighters and local allies in Waziristan, a lawless mountain region along the frontier. US-led troops are also striking from the Afghan side in what the Pentagon is calling a "hammer and anvil" operation.

A senior Afghan official said Pakistan's US allies would rather take any senior al Qaeda figure alive but that was hard among men who make suicide a key weapon: "Al Qaeda will fight to the last bullet and do everything possible to avoid capture.

"So if all else fails, there might be no other option but to strike with all means possible."

US FORCES

The capture of Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor regarded as the "brains" of al Qaeda, would be little less of a coup for Western intelligence and politicians than that of bin Laden himself.

A US defence official said US forces and the Pakistanis were coordinating on both sides of the border to corner al Qaeda figures, believed to have sought refuge there after US-led forces ousted their Afghan Taleban protectors in response to the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

US officials have said the secretive Task Force 121, a covert commando involved in the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq three months ago, was now on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told CNN Zawahri's capture would not end the war on al Qaeda: "It would of course be a major step forward in the war on terrorism...But I think we have to be careful not to assume that getting one al Qaeda leader is going to break up the organization...We have to dismantle the entire network."

Western intelligence sources say Zawahri and bin Laden were believed to be close to each other, somewhere in Waziristan.

Though on the run since the US invasion of Afghanistan, Zawahri has continued to play a propagandist role for al Qaeda with a series of audiotapes inciting attacks on the West.

On February 24, one of his tapes attacked French moves to ban the Muslim veil in state schools and told President Bush to prepare for more attacks on the United States by "legion after legion seeking death and paradise."

The FBI lists Zawahri among its "Most Wanted Terrorists" with a bounty of $25 million on his head. He has been indicted in the United States for his alleged role in the August 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

- REUTERS