Bin Laden sons said wounded

A Pakistan official said yesterday two sons of Osama bin Laden were wounded and possibly arrested in an operation by US and Afghan troops in Afghanistan that killed at least nine suspected al Qaeda men.

But the governor of the Afghan province where the action was reported to have taken place on Thursday swiftly denied there had been any arrests, clouding an already confused picture.

And a spokesman for the US military in Afghanistan denied that US troops were in the area and said it had no information about the capture of sons of the al Qaeda leader.

Abdul Karim Barawi, governor of the Afghan province of Nimroz, told Reuters US troops were present in the Ribat region of his western province bordering Iran and Pakistan.

"Their choppers hover on and off, but I totally reject the report made by the Pakistani minister about the arrest of two of (bin Laden's) sons", he said.

Earlier, Sardar Sanaullah Zehri, home minister of the western Pakistani province of Baluchistan, told Reuters: "We have information that two sons of Osama bin Laden were injured. The people killed belonged to al Qaeda.

"We have heard that they (the sons) may have been arrested. But our information may not be 100 per cent true," he said.

The minister, who was speaking during a visit to the southern port city of Karachi, said he had no information that bin Laden had been in the Ribat area at the time of the raid.

US officials said this week they believed bin Laden was in the rugged tribal borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yousufzai, who interviewed bin Laden in 1998, he then had 13 children.

Yesterday's report follow the arrest last weekend of suspected September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which raised hopes interrogators could get leads on bin Laden's whereabouts.

The world's most wanted man has evaded US forces since a US bombing campaign against al Qaeda and forces of the ousted Taliban government in Afghanistan in late 2001.

Officers of Pakistan's Frontier Corps said Pakistani and some US forces had also been pursuing al Qaeda suspects in the part of the Ribat district on the Pakistani side of the border.

But Zehri said the operation had been inside Afghanistan. Ribat, a sandy desert region, straddles the border about 900 kilometres southwest of the Afghan capital Kabul.

Master Sergeant Richard Breach, a public affairs officer at the US military headquarters at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, said the US-led coalition had no troops in the area where bin Laden's son's were reported to have been captured.