Pakistani president Asif Al Zardari told reporters Monday that Al Queda leader Osama bin Laden may be dead, but he has no concrete proof on it.
The comments came during a press conference when Zardari was asked about the terrorist leader. Zardari said American officials told him they do not know where bin Laden is.
“They are much more informed,” Zardari said. “They’ve been actually after him for a longer time. They’ve got more equipment. They’ve got more intelligence. … so they tell us they have no trace at the moment.”
Zardari added that his country’s intelligence agencies “obviously feel that he does not exist anymore,” but he didn’t explain how or when they reached that conclusion, and quickly qualified his comment by saying bin Laden “may be dead.”
“That’s not confirmed. We can’t confirm that,” he said. “It’s still in between fiction and fact.”
American officials were quick to counter Zardari’s remarks. “We continue to believe that bin Laden is alive,” an anonymous US official told The Associated Press.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, appearing later Monday with his visiting British counterpart at a news conference, seemed surprised when a reporter asked about Zardari’s remarks.
“I don’t know what are the comments of the president, but at the same time, I must clarify this, that nobody knows about Osama bin Laden,” Gilani said. “We don’t know about it, whether he is alive or dead.”
Mahmood Shah, a former security chief in the tribal regions, said he believes bin Laden is alive. “Where, I don’t know. If he had died, we would have heard a lot of noise among the militants. From that I’d guess that he is alive,” he said.
Ben Venzke, director of IntelCenter, the U.S. contractor that tracks extremist propaganda, said it was unlikely al-Qaida would keep bin Laden’s death a secret.
“Bin Laden’s death will likely be celebrated by the group and its affiliates as him having achieved martyrdom as opposed to the group seeing it as a crushing and demoralizing blow,” Venzke said.
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