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IS OSAMA BIN LADEN DEAD?
By M H AHSAN
Osama bin Laden, charismatic founder of al-Qaeda, died of typhoid earlier this month in Pakistan, according to a highly classified intelligence brief given to the King of Saudi Arabia and President Chirac this week, and leaked to the French newspaper L'Est Republicain.
The chief of the terror group was known to have been suffering from acute typhoid and seeking treatment in Pakistan in mid-August. This was picked up and tracked by Saudi intelligence services. The same sources, said by the French to be very reliable, believe he later died.
The powerful Pakistani intelligence agency the ISI - at times virtually a parallel government, instrumental among other things in founding the Taliban - has not confirmed the report. "We have no information on Osama's death," a senior Pakistan Interior Ministry official said on Saturday morning.
Bin Laden last appeared on video in 2004. A few poor-quality audio tapes purporting to be of his voice surfaced earlier this year - but it was impossible to say when the original recordings were made.
The reaction of the bin Laden command cell of al-Qaeda to the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks was surprisingly muted and unfocused. It said al-Qaeda would attack "American targets" again, and that all Americans should "convert to Islam".
It is now clear that most of the talking, and broadcasting, by the old command cell has been done by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, spokesman and ideologue for bin Laden and always seen as his Number 2. The highly articulate doctor came to the surface in the security operations following the assassination of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. He can only exist in the shadow of the magnetism of bin Laden and is not seen as a leader or strategist in his own right.
Much the same goes for the al-Qaeda movement as a whole. Like other, admittedly smaller, terrorist groups such as Italy's Red Brigades, it has found it hard to reprise its big spectacular. It has never done anything like 9/11 since. Attacks like the Bali and Mombasa bombs, the train and transport bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in July last year may have been carried out in the name of Islamic revolution - adopting the al-Qaeda logo as it were - but they were not under bin Laden's direct command.
The attacks appear to be loosely linked homegrown efforts whose ideological and operational roots are in Pakistan and Bangladesh as much as in the bin Laden training camps in Waziristan and Kashmir.
The death of bin Laden, if it is confirmed, will be cloaked in the propaganda of martyrdom, mourning and revenge. It could also trigger a major rethink of such notions as "Global War on Terror", which is long overdue. It will be a blow to the sloganising of the neo-conservatives - and their notion of the "clash of civilisations" - and to the high-flown rhetoric of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.
It is likely to mean not so much "back to basics" in tackling terrorism, but back to the practicalities of how to deal with terrorists in the real world.
All the evidence points to L'Est Republicain's exclusive report today about the death of Osama bin Laden being the result of a calculated leak from within the Direction Generale des Services Exterieurs (DGSE), which is the French equivalent of Britain's MI6 with responsibility for intelligence gathering abroad.
The newspaper says the information about bin Laden, received by the DGSE on September 19 and graded confidentiel defence, was passed to President Jacques Chirac and PM Dominique de Villepin on September 21.
The contents of L'Est Republicain's report suggests that the newspaper had direct access to this DGSE material: quoting from what appears to be an internal memorandum, it states that a "usually most reliable source" had learned that the Saudi Arabian secret services believed that bin Laden had travelled to Pakistan on or around August 23 to seek immediate medical treatment for a severe bout of typhoid which had partially paralysed his lower body.
The authorities subsequently received information that he had died on September 4: Saudi security agencies were urgently seeking more information, focusing on where bin Laden may have been buried.
On past form, the DGSE might have been expected to leak such dramatic news to one of the Paris-based national newspapers - Le Figaro has been a regular beneficiary in the past - but L'Est Republicain is among the country's oldest and most respected provincial dailies, with a circulation of some 500,000.
The French Defence Ministry's announcement of an investigation into the leak could indicate that L'Est Republicain's information did indeed come from the top.
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