Osama Bin Laden ‘seen in Afghanistan this year’

In the same week that the Pakistan government reacted angrily to Gordon Brown's demand that they make more of an effort to "take out" Osama Bin Laden, claiming there was no evidence he was in their country, evidence has been offered to suggest that the al-Qaeda leader was based in Afghanistan earlier this year.

The claim is made by a member of the Taliban being held in Pakistan. According to Orla Guerin of the BBC, reporting from Islamabad, she was given access to the man - who cannot be named for legal reasons - twice in the past month.

He told her that in January or February this year he met a trusted contact who had only 15 or days before met Bin Laden in Afghanistan.

According to the Taliban detainee, his contact was a Mehsud tribesman, responsible for arranging meetings with Bin Laden for al-Qaeda operatives based abroad.

"He helps al-Qaeda people coming from other countries to get to the sheikh, so he can advise them on whatever they are planning for Europe or other places," the man told Guerin.

"The sheikh doesn't stay in any one place. That guy came from Ghazni [a province of eastern Afghanistan with a strong Taliban presence], so I think that's where the sheikh was."

The Taliban detainee explained to Guerin that Pakistan was not a "convenient" base for militants because of the high level of US drone attacks, which would explain Bin Laden's move across the border.

The detainee's testimony has to be taken with a large of grain of salt - mainly because of its timing. It suits the Pakistanis because it supports their protestations that Bin Laden is not hiding in their country. Pakistan's Prime Minister Raza Gilani told Born this week that Bin Laden was not in Pakistan and claimed his country had been "extremely successful" in tackling terrorism.

And it suits the Americans because it gives credibility to President Obama's deployment of 30,000 more troops to root out the Taliban and stop Afghanistan becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda.

Should the Taliban detainee's evidence be treated seriously at all? Guerin, a respected television journalist who became the BBC's Pakistan correspondent after spells in Africa and the Middle East, has questioned a former CIA analyst, Bruce Riedel, who says the story is plausible and should be followed up.

"The entire Western intelligence community, CIA and M16, have been looking for Osama Bin Laden for the last seven years and haven't come upon a source of information like this," Riedel told Guerin. "So if it's true - a big if - this is an extraordinary and important story." ·