Substantial reward offered for capture of Osama Bin Laden
A US$ 25 million reward is now being offered by the US Government for the capture of terrorist Osama Bin Laden.
The cash reward is hoped to persuade local people to look hard for Bin Laden in his tunnel and cave network in the mountains of Afghanistan.
US intelligence consider it most likely that Bin Laden will remain in Afghanistan, rather than try to flee elsewhere. He is expected to either hide in one location, or move between several hide-outs in the rugged, mountainous strip of Afghanistan running roughly from southeast of Kandahar, up to south of Kabul and Jalalabad.
In the past , Bin Laden has always travelled with a small, armed security force, using couriers to communicate.
The United States is currently bombing any hide-outs it knows about, both south of Jalalabad and south of Kandahar, using a "bunker-buster" that can dig under the surface and explode in a tunnel, and fuel-air explosives that can suck out a cave’s oxygen.
The United States are now faced with he decision to send commandos into caves, but that is extremely dangerous.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that he hopes the "substantial monetary rewards" will convince "a large number of Afghan people to begin crawling through those tunnels and caves looking for the bad folks."
