Suspected Terrorist Missing, Taliban Says

Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the bombings of two U.S. embassies last year, is “missing” from his Central Asian sanctuary of Afghanistan, the country’s leaders said Saturday.

Leaders of Afghanistan’s radical Taliban movement, who have been sheltering the alleged terrorist since 1996, reported Saturday that Bin Laden had disappeared.

The whereabouts of Bin Laden, who has been living in a network of fortified caves in southeastern Afghanistan, remained unknown late Saturday. Diplomatic officials here speculated that he may have fled to Iraq, which reportedly offered the Saudi dissident a haven earlier this month.

“Osama bin Laden has gone missing,” the supreme Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said Saturday from Kandahar, Afghanistan. “We did not order him to leave . . . but we do not know where he is.”

Another senior Taliban official said Saturday that there had been no contact with Bin Laden since Friday.

Bin Laden, perhaps the world’s most wanted suspected terrorist, has been indicted in a U.S. court for plotting the August bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people.

Shortly after the bombings, the U.S. military fired cruise missiles at suspected terrorist training camps near Khost, Afghanistan, that were allegedly run by Bin Laden.

The news of Bin Laden’s apparent disappearance followed a campaign of intense pressure by U.S. officials to force Taliban leaders to expel him from the country.

Bin Laden, a veteran of the jihad--or holy war--to expel the former Soviet Union from Afghanistan, has long been considered by the Taliban to be an honored guest.

Taliban Warned of New U.S. Strikes

U.S. officials, worried that Bin Laden was preparing to strike again, recently hinted that it might launch more military strikes against Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Earlier this month, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karl F. Inderfurth met with Taliban leaders in Pakistan and delivered a blunt warning: If Bin Laden struck again, the U.S. would hold the Taliban responsible.

The warning, according to a senior Clinton administration official, seemed to hit home.

The U.S. official said he believes that Taliban officials pressured Bin Laden to leave Afghanistan as a “face-saving way” to deal with the problem.

The Taliban envoys “made it clear that they recognized that his presence in Afghanistan was a serious problem for them,” the U.S. official said. “I think they were feeling the heat.”

Shortly after the Inderfurth meeting, Taliban officials announced that they had taken away Bin Laden’s telephones, forbade him from engaging in political activity and begun to monitor his movements.

However, Taliban officials had made such promises before, and it was unclear to what extent they were enforced--or how Bin Laden reacted.

Taliban officials said Saturday that they had been unmoved by U.S. pressure. Yet in interviews last week, several Taliban officials expressed worries that the U.S. was preparing to launch another attack--possibly aimed at Kandahar, the southern Afghan city that hosts much of the Taliban’s senior leadership.

“We are not scared of U.S. threats,” Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Hassan Rehmani said Saturday. “The Taliban has made all preparations to defend Kandahar and the rest of Afghanistan against American attacks by land, air or sea.”

U.S. Still Not Sure Bin Laden Is Missing

There was speculation Saturday that Bin Laden’s departure might have been linked to a promise by U.S. officials to extend diplomatic recognition to the ultra-orthodox Islamic movement.

The U.S. does not maintain diplomatic relations with the Taliban movement, which has been shunned worldwide for its human rights record and treatment of women.

American officials say they have made no promises to Taliban leaders, but they have let the Taliban know that there was no chance of U.S. diplomatic recognition as long as Bin Laden remained a guest.

A senior administration official cautioned that the U.S. was still trying to confirm Bin Laden’s disappearance.

“It could also all be baloney,” the official said. “The [Taliban] could be trying to bluff us.”

Speculation swirled Saturday about Bin Laden’s whereabouts: Some said he had gone to Iraq, some suggested that he was captured by U.S. commandos. Others guessed that he disappeared into the rugged wilds of Afghanistan. Still others figured that he fled to Iran or even Chechnya.

In Washington, National Security Council spokesman David Leavy flatly denied speculation that the U.S. or its allies had captured the suspected terrorist. He added that, although he could not confirm Bin Laden’s whereabouts, “the one place he should be is behind bars and brought to justice for the crimes he has committed.”

Character From Cheap Crime Novel

Bin Laden is vivid enough to have stepped from a cheap crime novel: He has three wives, 13 children and a fortune of $100 million. For the last three years he has lived in a cave--equipped with satellite phones and computers. He routinely denies responsibility for individual terrorist attacks, but he boasts of his hatred for the U.S.

“We believe the biggest thieves and terrorists in the world are the Americans,” he told ABC’s “Nightline” last year. “The only way for us to fend off these assaults is to use similar means. We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They are all targets.”

In his early 40s, Bin Laden has been fighting in the name of Islam--and against its perceived enemies--for almost 20 years.

A revered commander during the Afghan holy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, he turned to other targets when that war ended in 1989.

Bringing together many of his comrades from the Afghan war, he is believed to have used his family fortune to build a terrorist network that spanned the world.

U.S. counter-terrorism officials now believe that he played a role in bombings aimed at U.S. troops in Yemen in 1992, a 1993 attack that killed 19 American service members in Somalia, and a 1994 plot to blow up 11 U.S. airliners in Asia, which, had it been successful, would have ranked as one of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever.

Bin Laden denied involvement in two deadly attacks against American soldiers in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, but he lauded them both.

“I have great respect for the people who did this. They are heroes,” he told CNN recently.

At a news conference called at his Khost base early last year, Bin Laden called for a jihad against U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia.

“It is incumbent upon all Muslims to wage a jihad against them [U.S. forces] and evict them from the holy lands,” he said.

After initially denying any involvement in the embassy bombings last year, Bin Laden suggested in an interview published this year that he may have had a greater role.

“Our job is to instigate and, by the grace of God, we did that, and certain people responded to this instigation,” he said.

In Washington, experts were betting that, out of all the world leaders, the most likely to rescue Bin Laden from the U.S. was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“Bin Laden and Saddam could see eye to eye,” said a Mideast specialist who asked not to be identified. “It’s possible. Abu Nidal went there. Maybe Saddam is beginning to collect these people.”

Filkins reported from Islamabad, Drogin from Washington. Times staff writer Robin Wright in Washington and special correspondents Ismail Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Rahimullah Yusufzai in Kandahar, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.