Al-Qaida diehards push into Pakistan

Several thousand al-Qaida and Taliban fighters were reported to be trying to escape towards the Pakistan border yesterday, fleeing heavy assaults by US and anti-Taliban forces in the Tora Bora mountains, as speculation mounted over the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

Despite radio intercepts of a voice apparently that of Bin Laden over the weekend, commanders of the Eastern Shura anti-Taliban forces say they now believe that bin Laden escaped the area up to a week ago, accompanied by a guard of up to 200 fighters.

US officials added yesterday that they believed that some 2,000 bin Laden loyalists were on the run near Afghanistan's porous border with Pakistan.

Unconfirmed reports from Pakistan claim that Bin Laden has slipped past Pakistani border patrols, despite the deployment of an extra 4,000 Pakistani troops and frontier militia forces equipped with helicopter gunships, to guard Pakistan's border where it meets the White Mountains of Afghanistan.

Fears that Bin Laden may be trying to escape Afghanistan come as evidence emerged of a concerted effort by some Taliban and al-Qaida fighters to cross into Pakistan, following a series of arrests of foreign fighters over the weekend in Pakistan's border regions.

According to interior ministry officials, late last week some 340 suspected Taliban, including Pakistanis, and 40 suspected al-Qaida fighters have so far been detained trying to flee into Pakistan.

Many senior Taliban and al-Qaida members are believed to have sent their families into Pakistan at the beginning of the US bombing campaign. They were joined in the first few weeks of the war by a handful of more moderate Taliban figures who abandoned Mullah Omar's regime.

Now it appears the most fanatical members of the two groups are trying to cross to where the Taliban movement was born and fostered by Pakistani agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), among the hundreds of religious schools (madrassas) in the border areas where Afghan refugees have settled over the years.

Many Pakistanis in these remote areas - including, say some, dissident ISI officers - still support the Taliban and it would be easy for fleeing fighters to disappear into these towns and villages.

Last week a spokesman for the governor of the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Gul Agha Sherzai, told the Guardian that he had evidence of three separate escape routes being used by senior Taliban and al-Qaida members, adding that Pakistani smugglers were charging $5,000 (£3,440) to take them over the myriad of illegal crossings.

Pakistan has been moved in recent weeks to deny that senior Taliban and al-Qaida figures were already sheltering in Pakistan.

A number of injured fighters have managed to cross the border where some are being treated under arrest in Pakistani hospitals.