World News 19-11-2001 Net Tightens On Bin Laden who: US Forces what: Say they have Osama bin Laden cornered where: Afghanistan when: Yesterday snippet: "As talks for a broad-based Afghan government looked likely to start in Europe this week, US forces have focused their search for Osama bin Laden on the Tora Bora mountains near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan," report Justin Huggler and Peter Popham in this morning`s Independent. "Isolated and on the run" is how the Times describes bin Laden, suggesting that the routed Taleban leadership have abandoned him and "left him to his fate. The Taleban declared that he no longer enjoyed their protection and was beyond their help." BBC Online quotes US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told US televsion: "I think he`s still in Afghanistan. It`s getting harder for him to hide as more and more territory is removed from Taleban control. We are going to dig him out of his hole." With a $25m reward now being offered for information leading to his capture, the British Government also believes bin Laden`s time is running out, but admit that nobody has reliable information on his whereabouts: "The area in which he can operate is considerably decreased but where he is we don`t know. There is nothing to suggest he is out of the country," a British defence source explains in the Guardian, whose Julian Borger is more circumspect about the allied forces` proximity to locating the fugitive leader. "The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, mused last week on the possibility of the terrorist leader`s escape in a helicopter hidden in the canyons of the eastern highlands. Other defence officials have pointed out the porous nature of the Afghan-Pakistan border. The London-based al-Hayat daily newspaper quoted a man it said belonged to al-Qaida as saying Bin Laden had deployed 10 lookalikes to throw pursuers off his trail. The only way to tell them apart, he said, was by their birthmarks." [... more]

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