Bin Laden Hunt Enters Pakistan

U.S. intelligence agencies have expanded their search for Osama bin Laden into western Pakistan, using spy satellites and other highflying intelligence-gathering aircraft in the attempt to find the elusive terrorist leader, American officials said Tuesday.

The widening hunt comes amid conflicting and unconfirmed reports that Bin Laden may have fled Afghanistan. American intelligence officials warned that although they haven’t been able to verify any of the alleged sightings of Bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan in recent weeks, reports that he has escaped may be a ruse to mislead U.S. forces.

Pakistan has deployed thousands of military and paramilitary troops, backed by helicopter gunships and observation aircraft, along its rugged western border with Afghanistan to stop fleeing fighters in Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.

U.S. officials expressed confidence that the military regime in Pakistan, which supported Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers until Sept. 11, is cooperating fully in the dragnet for Bin Laden and his top command.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the Pakistanis have “increased the level of their vigilance in the areas that abut Afghanistan.” He added, “We’re fairly confident that, if it’s possible to find people trying to slip across the border, that they’re making every effort to do so.”

But the CIA has augmented the Pakistani effort, deploying pilotless Predator aircraft with high-resolution cameras over suspected hide-outs in the region. Military Global Hawk drones gathered electronic intelligence from a higher altitude.

Bombers and strike aircraft, including B-1s and F/A-18s, circled over the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan near Pakistan but, for the first time in two weeks, dropped no bombs as U.S. Special Forces and Afghan troops combed rocky valleys and rugged ridges for signs that Bin Laden is either dead or alive.

Senior Bush administration officials acknowledged that Bin Laden has in effect vanished and that it wasn’t certain whether he was alive or whether he had escaped to Pakistan or elsewhere.

“We don’t know where he is now, and he could be on the run,” Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, told a Pentagon news briefing.

In Brussels, defense ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization expressed concern that the apparent escape of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Al Qaeda fighters from the battle in Tora Bora, where they made a bitter last stand, could destabilize Afghanistan’s neighbors or other nations.

A U.S. intelligence official cautioned that the CIA has been unable to confirm a rash of reported sightings of Bin Laden. He specifically discounted recent published reports that Bin Laden was heard speaking over a radio frequency in the Tora Bora region. He said that no tape was made of the supposed broadcast and that the claim was impossible to verify.

“There’s one every day, or many every day, of people who say they’ve heard or seen Bin Laden,” the official said. “It’s like Elvis sightings.”

But the official said those offering the information, including Al Qaeda prisoners, are “of varying reliability and with varying motivations. Some say he’s definitely in Pakistan, or somewhere else, but they may want us to think that so we can focus the search on a place where he’s not.”

The focus of the search Tuesday remained the Tora Bora area, where Bin Laden was believed to have hidden in one of the hundreds of caves and catacombs dug into the mountains. Many of the caves now have been sealed by U.S. bombs, while others are too unstable to enter.

“This really is very, very difficult,” Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. “It’s going to be step by step, cave by cave, and to put a time limit on that would be imprudent right now.”

U.S. Soldier Injured While Clearing Mines

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, a U.S. Army soldier was injured Tuesday while trying to clear mines at Bagram air base, north of the capital, Kabul, the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., reported. The soldier, whose name wasn’t disclosed, was taken to a nearby military hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, officials said. And in the southern city of Kandahar, FBI agents, newly arrived in Afghanistan, helped interrogate Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners Tuesday about their knowledge of the terror network. Before that, CIA and military intelligence officers had done most of the prisoner interviews.

The first Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners arrived Tuesday at a makeshift prison built by U.S. Marines at the Kandahar airport. After being examined by Navy doctors, the men were then housed behind a barbed-wire fence ringed with guards. Fifteen prisoners had arrived by Tuesday night, all of them captured during last month’s battle for the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

In Brussels, where Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld attended the NATO meeting, a U.S. defense official said the alliance’s defense chiefs worry that “one of the outgrowths of the activity in Afghanistan was that Al Qaeda might try to get out of the country and possibly into neighboring countries, or farther afield.” Rumsfeld praised Pakistan for sending border guards to turn away Al Qaeda fighters seeking to cross over from Tora Bora.

“We are putting a great deal of pressure on the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, which is causing them to move and run and flee and hide,” Rumsfeld said. “And one of the places they can flee to is Pakistan.”

Pakistan has arrested dozens of fugitives along its border since the battle around Tora Bora began, according to a spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.

Asad Hayauddin, the embassy’s press attache, said Pakistan has army troops, federal militia members and local law enforcement officers engaged in the search.

He acknowledged the difficulty of sealing the long border, which ranges from desolate desert areas to 15,000-foot mountain peaks. But he said Pakistani authorities are determined to track down any fugitives if they seek sanctuary in the country.

Hayauddin said he was unaware of any agreement between Pakistan and the United States that would allow U.S. personnel to pursue fugitives from Afghanistan into Pakistan but said his government would consider any such request.

Haron Amin, the Washington representative of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which is viewed as hostile to Pakistan, said the neighboring country is the first and obvious place for Bin Laden to seek refuge.

“Only one country,” Amin said, “could be the plausible site of Bin Laden’s next abode.”

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Times staff writers John Hendren in Brussels, Tony Perry in Kandahar and David Lamb in Tora Bora contributed to this report.