Washington — U.S. officials said Friday they could not prove or disprove speculation by Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that Osama bin Laden is dead.
Musharraf told CNN he suspected that bin Laden, blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks, probably had succumbed to kidney disease.
![In this image made from video broadcast by the Qatar-based
television station Al-Jazeera Dec. 27, 2001, Osama Bin Laden speaks
from an undisclosed location at an undisclosed time. Pakistan]s
President Pervez Musharraf said it was his belief that bin Laden,
who suffered from kidney disease, was dead.](http://media.lawrence.com/img/photos/2002/01/19/PAKISTANBINLADEN_t180.jpg?370a03faaa4bde2115f371a02430eb3e6a451be5)
In this image made from video broadcast by the Qatar-based television station Al-Jazeera Dec. 27, 2001, Osama Bin Laden speaks from an undisclosed location at an undisclosed time. Pakistan]s President Pervez Musharraf said it was his belief that bin Laden, who suffered from kidney disease, was dead.
"I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a patient, he is a kidney patient," Musharraf said. "We know that he donated two dialysis machines into Afghanistan. One was specifically for his own personal use. I don't know if he has been getting all that treatment in Afghanistan now.
"I would give the first priority that he is dead and the second priority that he is alive somewhere in Afghanistan."
Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of American and allied forces in the Afghanistan region, said he had "not seen anything" to verify Musharraf's suspicion.
"We don't know the location of bin Laden," Franks said during a press briefing in Tampa, Fla. "Bin Laden could be . . . alive or dead, or in Afghanistan or not."
"But we know this," he said. "The world is not a large enough place for him to hide."
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said that if the al-Qaida leader were dead, "I don't think the president would view that as an unwelcome event."
Bin Laden has been in videotapes broadcast since the terror attacks in New York and Washington. The most recent was an undated tape, broadcast Dec. 27 by the al Jazeera Arab-language network, in which bin Laden appeared to be sick. He had lost weight and, though left-handed, gesticulated with only his right.
Defense Department officials have said that bin Laden could have been killed in the bombings of cave complexes at Tora Bora and Zawar Kili, but that they had no evidence.
Franks said that numerous military intelligence reports of bin Laden's whereabouts all have proved invalid.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday that officials believed bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar were still in Afghanistan.
In another development, Franks said that canisters of chemicals discovered by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and mentioned by Rumsfeld as possibly containing weapons of mass destruction do not appear to contain anything to warrant "immediate alarm."
The canisters had Russian writing and skull and crossbones symbols on them, Franks said. They have been sent to the United States for further analysis.
In Pakistan, police on Thursday arrested eight alleged al-Qaida fighters three Pakistanis and one each from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Britain, Morocco and Afghanistan, a senior Pakistani law enforcement official said Friday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The eight were in a jeep that ran a person over and took off, and police gave chase. When police stopped them in Mianwali, Punjab, they found seven of the eight men disguised under the traditional head-to-foot covering of Afghan women.
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