Afghanistan's Taliban regime yesterday said it would ask Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan when it found him, according to the Afghan Islamic Press agency.
Taliban spokesman Abdul Hayee Motmaen told the Peshawar-based news agency that bin Laden was "missing."
"When we locate him we will deliver him the decision of the ulema [Islamic scholars] that he leave Afghanistan of his own accord," the spokesman said.
Asked to respond to the reports, US President George W. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, told the Fox News Sunday program: "We are not going to be deterred by comments that he may be missing."
Meanwhile, investigators are turning up more by the day. More hot leads. Many mirages. Fugitives wanted abroad. Arabic names that ring alarms here but are as common in the Middle East as Smith and Jones in America.
Confusion, yes. Evidence, too.
The picture is emerging of a conspiracy or series of conspiracies hatched with the placement of experienced terrorists in the US as far back as the mid-1990s to get the lay of the land, hone skills and insinuate themselves into American life.
It has become clearer their aims were, and likely still are, broader than the four airliners they commandeered to such devastating effect.
Investigators now think five or six teams of hijackers might have meant to deploy Sept. 11, and that the events that day were to be just the opening round of death dealt in a variety of ways, over a period of time.
In apparent breakthroughs over week's end:
-- French authorities arrested seven people for an alleged plot to harm US sites in France.
-- German officials sought two fugitives suspected of aiding three of the hijackers and of forming a terrorist group.
-- British police questioned three men and a woman arrested Friday under an anti-terrorism law that allows police to hold suspects for seven days without charges.
Still, despite a dragnet that has rounded up scores of people, no one on US soil has been charged directly in the terror attacks. Huge gaps remain in the case.
The norm of a complex criminal investigation -- patiently piece together the evidence, watch and wait out the prey while trying to build a slam-dunk case, then prosecute them fully -- doesn't apply this time.
Two urgent goals are being pursued: Head off a second wave of terrorism on US soil and nail down the leads necessary for the military to go on the offensive, in a way that leaves little doubt to Americans and other countries that the right people are under attack.
And, of course, bring the perpetrators to court.
Some 7,000 FBI agents and their support personnel are on the case, as are the US intelligence apparatus and untold others in law enforcement and related fields, not counting US forces amassing overseas.
Eighty people have been detained using immigration laws that offer latitude to scoop up suspects and hold them indefinitely.
The dragnet -- so wide that many Middle Easterners found simply with immigration problems are being drawn into it -- has snagged a cast littered with associates, affiliates or supporters of bin Laden.
US authorities say they have more on bin Laden -- perhaps enough to end any notion among moderate influential Muslims abroad that he is merely a dirty player in a worthy cause, but instead has been caught in pure evil.
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