Forces Search For Mullah Omar

KABUL, Friday - Afghan fighters, backed by U.S. forces, have taken up positions around a village where Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar is believed to have taken refuge, said an official in the southern city of Kandahar.“I have no news about Mullah Omar’s capture... We would know within half an hour if he is captured,” said Nasratullah, secretary to Kandahar intelligence chief Haji Gullalai.Afghanistan’s Minister for Reconstruction said on Germany’s ARD television on Thursday he believed Omar had been captured, and Australia’s ABC television said on Friday it had heard the same from a senior official of the Northern Alliance, the main opposition to the Taliban.But the U.S. had no knowledge of it. “We don’t have anything on that,” Marines Major Ralph Mills, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Florida, told Reuters. U.S. forces in the area were making house-to-house searches for him around Baghran in southern Helmand province.“Americans have been searching houses in Baghran,” he told Reuters, referring to the remote, mountainous region in Helmand, 160 km (100 miles) northwest of Kandahar city.ReuterEnds