Afghanistan says bin Laden is in Pakistan

Berlin - Osama bin Laden is living in Pakistan close to the Afghan border, but Pakistani authorities are only making "half-hearted" efforts to catch him, Afghanistan's foreign minister was quoted as saying on Saturday.

Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper asked Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta in an interview whether recent reports that the al Qaeda leader was living in Pakistan were true.

"According to everything we know, he really is living in Pakistan, near to the Afghan border," Spanta said.

"Our neighbour could certainly catch him and put him in court. But to our knowledge, their efforts to do this have always been half-hearted," he said, according to the advance text of an article due to appear in the paper on Sunday.

A senior US security official said earlier this month that most of the al Qaeda and Taliban leadership had found safe haven in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt that borders Afghanistan, and that bin Laden was probably living in Pakistan.

The remarks were angrily rejected by Islamabad.