A high-ranking member of the Taliban insurgent group who is now detained in Pakistan says that he was offered a chance to have a meeting with Osama bin Laden in January or February of this year, and ‘that the al-Qaeda leader is in eastern Afghanistan, not northern Pakistan as widely believed.’ This inmate had met with bin Laden ‘numerous times before 9/11, says he spoke to a bin Laden contact from Afghanistan’s Ghazni province, which is largely a no-go area for Afghan and coalition troops.’

The detainee said that ‘earlier this year he met a trusted contact who had seen Bin Laden 15 to 20 days earlier across the border in Afghanistan.’ He claimed, “In 2009, in January or February I met this friend of mine. He said he had come from meeting Sheikh Osama, and he could arrange for me to meet him.”

The detainee’s contact is said to be ‘a Mehsud tribesman, responsible for getting al-Qaeda operatives based abroad to meetings with Bin Laden.’ “He helps al-Qaeda people coming from other countries to get to the sheikh, so he can advise them on whatever they are planning for Europe or other places. The sheikh doesn’t stay in any one place. That guy came from Ghazni, so I think that’s where the sheikh was,” the Taliban detainee further added.

US intelligence is amazed at the latest information. According to former CIA analyst Bruce Reidel, “The entire Western intelligence community, CIA and M16, have been looking for Osama Bin Laden for the last seven years and haven’t come upon a source of information like this. So if it’s true – a big if – this is an extraordinary and important story. We know Osama Bin Laden is alive. We know that he is living somewhere in the badlands along the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan. What is extraordinary about this story is we have someone who has come forward and said, really for the first time, ‘I met with Osama Bin Laden and I had the opportunity to meet him again in the recent past’.”

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Via BBC