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Officials dismiss CNN report that Mullah Omar in Pakistan

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LAHORE, Pakistan (CNN) -- Taliban leader Mullah Omar is not hiding in Pakistan, a Pakistani military official said, disputing a Friday CNN report that he called "ludicrous."

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said he is "quite certain" Mullah Omar is in Afghanistan. The CNN report, he said, is "baseless."

"These reports are ludicrous because we haven't got any evidence of the presence of Mullah Omar in Pakistan over the past many years," Sultan said. "We are quite certain that Mullah Omar is not present in Pakistan and that he is present inside of Afghanistan."

Sultan was reiterating a statement released earlier by the Pakistani government, which said there was no evidence that Mullah Omar was in Pakistan and that the news report was a "baseless and concocted story and nothing but mere figment of reporters' imagination."

The fact that "such sensitive information" turned up on the news rather than official channels "is a good enough indication that it is nothing but an effort to create sensation, and has no reality," the statement said.

The U.S. intelligence source who provided the information to CNN said the elusive Taliban leader is believed to be in or near Quetta, a city of 1 million people that is the capital of Baluchistan province in southwestern Pakistan. (Full story).

"At one point we had it down to a particular section of Quetta," the intelligence source said.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, during a speech Thursday in Kabul, didn't address the report, but said, "Please do understand the Pakistan government [is not] behind anything that is happening in Afghanistan."

Pakistan has received no evidence that Omar is there, Sultan said.

"If we get the intelligence that he's in Quetta, we would apprehend him," Sultan said. But, he said, a "sensible" intelligence official would pass the information to authorities rather than leak it to the media.

"I outrightly reject that information as just causing sensation and nothing else," Sultan said of the report. "If there is any real-time intelligence, I would again urge those sources to pass that intelligence through the fastest means to us so that we can take the appropriate measures to apprehend him."

The last known location for Mullah Omar was in the southern Afghanistan city of Kandahar, which he fled in December 2001 as U.S. forces closed in. The U.S. government is now offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the capture of Mullah Omar.

Mullah Omar continues to supply "high-level guidance" to his movement of religious warriors, although he is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the movement, a role that is largely played by military commander Mullah Dadullah, the intelligence source told CNN.

U.S. officials have been saying for some time that another of the world's most wanted men -- Mullah Omar's close friend and adviser, Osama bin Laden -- is believed to be in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area, and the intelligence source who spoke of Mullah Omar offered a location for bin Laden. (Watch the rocky border region believed to be hosting bin Laden -- 3:26)

Bin Laden is likely in Bajuar, a sparsely populated remote tribal region on the northern Afghan-Pakistan border, bordering Chitral, the source said. That is a region that a U.S. military intelligence official has cited as a strong possibility for the location of al Qaeda's leader.

Sultan also seemed dissatisfied with that assessment.

If there were "actionable intelligence" that bin Laden is in Bajuar, "we would certainly go for him," he said.

CNN's Peter Bergen, Anderson Cooper and Charlie Moore in Kabul and Mohsin Naqvi in Lahore contributed to this report.

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