Taliban says bin Laden alive and well

DUBAI: Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is alive and well, a source in Afghanistan's militant Taliban movement told Al-Arabiya news channel on Tuesday, denying recent reports of his death or illness.

"The (Taliban) movement has checked the reports (of bin Laden's death). The story is false. Bin Laden is alive," an unnamed official in the movement told the channel's office in Islamabad.

The Dubai-based station said that the source, who phoned its Pakistan office, denied previous reports claiming that the US' most-wanted man was ill.

A French intelligence memo, first published on Saturday in a French newspaper L'Est Republicain, claimed that Saudi intelligence concluded that bin Laden succumbed to typhoid fever sometime between August 23 and September 4 while in hiding in Pakistan.

French President Jacques Chirac as well as US, Pakistani and Afghan officials distanced themselves from the report, saying that it could not be confirmed.