Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, said on Saturday the Taliban had twice agreed to hand over Osama bin Laden to the kingdom but reneged after the US bombed Afghanistan in 1998.
Prince Turki also told the Middle East Broadcasting Center in an interview that he believed that Saudi-born bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 suicide attacks, saying those who felt otherwise were "turning a blind eye to the facts."
The prince, who served as intelligence chief for 24 years until August, said spiritual leader Mullah Mohammad Omar pledged at a meeting in June 1998 to turn bin Laden over. Taliban envoy Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, now the movement's foreign minister, had reiterated that vow during a visit to Saudi Arabia in July 1998.
"I asked Mullah Omar when I met with him and he agreed. He said: `We are ready,'" Prince Turki said of the June meeting, when he had first asked the Taliban to surrender bin Laden.
But that changed three months later, after the US had carried out air strikes on Afghanistan in response to bomb attacks in August 1998 on its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"In September I found Mullah Omar with a complete change. He even used abusive words against the [Saudi] kingdom ... so I interrupted the meeting," he said.
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
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