Bin Laden may have fled weeks ago

Osama bin Laden, the man held responsible for the atrocities of 11 September, has evaded his captors and may have made a clean getaway from southern Afghanistan.

A week ago western intelligence agencies, among them the CIA and the UK's MI6, were "almost sure" that he was holed up in the natural fortress of the Tora Bora cave complex in the White Mountains of Nangarhar Province south of Jalalabad.

Local Pashtun forces fighting through the caves and tunnels have found no trace of the Saudi renegade, and there is every indication that he has skipped Afghanistan - maybe some time ago. In building expectations that the al Qaeda leadership would be trapped in the Tora Bora complex, the intelligence agencies fed chosen journalists with tall tales of how Bin Laden had converted the Tora Bora into a "multi-layered fortress, with air conditioning, running water, dormitories and ammunition stores".

From Jalalabad helpful "local journalists" and guides said they knew of men who had supplied Bin Laden in the White Mountains. One account had an interview with "Bin Laden's grocer". Other "guides" said they knew "Bin Laden has been moving about at night, sometimes on foot, often on horseback".

Many of these helpful guides and informants were likely to be plants - used by the al Qaeda and hardline Taliban forces to cover the flight of their master strategist. Now the line from Jalalabad is that Bin Laden slipped across the border into the lawless North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, where he still has plenty of support. One Pentagon intelligence analyst believes he may have quit Afghanistan weeks ago. One intelligence analyst dismissed the tales of the last stand at Tora Bora, as "a load of baloney".

Bin Laden's last recorded interview appeared on 9 November with the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir of the English-language Dawn newspaper, which has favoured a strong pro-Taliban line. Mir met Bin Laden at a "mountain hideout", where the al Qaeda leader said he and his men would stand and fight "to the death". The interview now looks suspiciously like a cover for his flight from Afghanistan.

Escape would have been relatively easy. He could have gone through the bandit country of Baluchistan and down to the coast of Pakistan. An Omani special forces officer says that easiest route would be west into south eastern Iran. From there he could have slipped into Yemen, where he has family connections and supporters, or across into Somalia and possibly on to Sudan.

A new destination on the list is northern Nigeria, where al Qaeda is now understood to have a firm foothold in the militant Islamic groups involved in a murderous communal war with local Christians. All these countries now feature on the list of where America may take its campaign against al Qaeda and global terrorism next. Unless Iraq comes up first.