Saad bin Laden, son of al-Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden is killed in a US drone attack on Taliban hideouts in Pakistan early this year, say American officials.
“There are some indications that he may be dead, but it’s not 100 per cent certain,” an administration official was quoted as saying by America’s National Public Radio (NPR). The officials added:“ San bin Laden was a small player with a big name. He has never been a major operational figure. He was the third son.”
It was unclear whether Saad bin Laden was close to the location of his father, who is believed to be hiding in the rugged mountainous tribal belt along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, when he died.
According to the US Treasury, Saad bin Laden, who is believed to have been in his 20s, was part of a small group of al-Qaeda operatives who helped manage the organisation from Iran, where he was arrested in 2003.
He also allegedly helped facilitate communications between al-Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, following an al-Qaeda attack on the US embassy in Yemen in 2008.
The News International of Pakistan has said in a Peshawar date lined despatach that Senior Afghan Taliban and Punjabi militant commanders, having close association with Arabs, have denied the reports of death of Saad bin Laden.
‘There is no doubt that we lost some of our well-trained and senior people in the US drone attacks in tribal areas, but I can say for sure that Sheikh Osama and his family members were never hurt in any of these strikes’,two senior Afghan Taliban commanders claimed.
Pleading anonymity, the Taliban commanders claimed they had been well-aware of events taking place in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but they never heard about the loss of Saad bin Laden.
They argued though Saad had never been a senior al-Qaeda operative involved in any major operations, he was important because of being son of ‘Sheikh Osama’. According to them, Arab nationals, particularly important al-Qaeda members never stayed together and often spend their nights underground or in caves to evade losses.
‘Had Saad or anybody else of his family been injured or killed anywhere in Pakistan and Afghanistan, at least we would have been aware of that’, the Taliban commanders said. They said after the killing of two senior al-Qaeda commanders —Abu Laith al-Libbi and Abu Khabab al-Masri — in Mirali area of North Waziristan and Zyara Leeta area in South Waziristan respectively, al-Qaeda had not lost any important figure in the drone attacks.
The drones, they claimed, were now mostly targeting Pakistani and Afghan Taliban militants in the tribal areas because they usually stayed in large number and did not care about their security.
Besides taking other security arrangements, the Taliban said senior al-Qaeda operatives were often less accessible to even prominent Afghan and Pakistan Taliban commanders. A senior Punjabi Taliban commander, who had been associated with Arabs for the past several years in Afghanistan, said they neither used modern communication gadgets nor go to public places.
The CIA has set up a listening post in Chitral to monitor the suspected presence of Osama bin Laden in the area, a British newspaper reported. The US officials believe that the al-Qaeda leader is hiding in Pakistanís tribal areas.
