Wednesday October 10 7:33 AM ET

Taliban Say U.S. Not Safe While Strikes Go On

By Tahir Ikram

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Breathing defiance, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban denied Wednesday their air defenses had been destroyed by U.S.-led strikes and said the United States would not be safe if the attacks continued.

Taliban Ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef told a news conference that their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, and Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden, both prime targets of the attacks, were still alive after a third night of bombing and missile strikes.

``As long as America is shedding the blood of Afghans it will not be beneficial to America... If America is continuing attacks on Afghanistan it will also not be safe,'' Zaeef, the Taliban's only voice to outside the world, said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Americans took precautions Tuesday to counter the threat of germ warfare, their fears stoked by the death of one man in Florida from anthrax and a positive test for the disease returned by another man.

A spokesman for bin Laden's shadowy network, al Qaeda, vowed more attacks on the United States.

``Let America know that this battle will not leave its land until it exits our land, and until they stop supporting the Jews and lift the unjust sanctions on Iraq,'' spokesman Sulaiman Bu Ghaith said on Qatar's al-Jazeera satellite television station.

Zaeef said the Taliban had no evidence that al Qaeda was involved in terrorism.

``As we don't have any evidence against it, we don't consider al Qaeda a terrorist organization, but we don't support terrorism,'' he said.

Zaeef also dismissed U.S. reports that raids had destroyed the Taliban's defense capabilities. ``It is not true. American planes are flying very high... and are out of range,'' he said.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the missile and bomb onslaught against Afghanistan had crippled the Taliban's air defenses.

The Taliban have anti-aircraft guns positioned at key spots in its major towns and cities though they are ineffective against high-flying bombers. Zaeef said the air defenses were neither sophisticated nor modern.

Zaeef gave short shrift to the food that U.S. aircraft have dropped for hungry Afghans. ``American will not be able to purchase the Afghan people by money or food,'' he said.

FRENCH JOURNALIST

Zaeef said the movement was investigating whether a French reporter arrested in Afghanistan a day earlier while disguised in Muslim women's clothing was a spy.

``A French (man) has been arrested but I don't know if he is a journalist or a spy,'' Zaeef said.

``As you know, the French earlier announced they sent some spies into Afghanistan so the investigation is under way to determine that.''

Michel Peyrard, 44, a reporter for the French weekly Paris Match, had a satellite telephone, tape recorder and ``other spying instruments'' when he was detained Tuesday near the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, reports said.

Fellow journalists in Peshawar said Peyrard had told them he planned to slip into Afghanistan, which the ruling Taliban closed to foreign reporters after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States.

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2001