Taliban Reportedly Offered to Deport Bin Laden
June 4, 2004
ZDF reported that American and Taliban officials met secretly in Frankfurt in November 2000 to discuss deporting bin Laden long before his al Qaeda terrorist network successfully hijacked airliners and crashed them into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001.
The television documentary, which aired Thursday evening in Germany, said the Afghan-American businessman Kabir Mohabbat tried to broker a deal between the U.S. government and the hard-line Islamic Taliban. Mohabbat quoted the Taliban foreign minister, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, as saying: "You can have him whenever the Americans are ready. Name us a country and we will extradite him."
But no agreement was ever reached and talks were not attempted again before September 11 took place. Only after the attacks, on September 16 and 17, did the two sides meet again to discuss the issue in Pakistan, according to ZDF. Mohabbat said the United States wanted bin Laden deported with 24 hours, a demand the Taliban could not fulfil logistically.
German connection
A German member of the European Parliament, Elmar Brok, told the Reuters news agency that he had helped Mohabbat in 1999 to establish contact with the Americans.
"I was told that the Taliban had certain ideas about handing over bin Laden, not to the United States but to a third country or to the Court of Justice in The Hague," Brok said. "The message was: 'There is willingness to talk about handing over bin Laden', and the aim of the Taliban was clearly to win the recognition of the American government and the lifting of the boycott," he said.
A French general said on Thursday U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan have come close to catching bin Laden several times since the Taliban was toppled, but each time bin Laden was able to slip away.
"Since 2002, on at least two occasions, they have been able to locate him but he has managed to escape," the chief of staff of the French armed forces General Henri Bentegeat said according to the AFP news agency.