Washington: The trial of Osama bin Laden has gone cold, five years after he masterminded and executed the September 11 attacks.
US commandos whose job is to capture or kill bin Laden, have not received a credible lead in over two years, The Washington Post reported on its website on Saturday.
The report cited unnamed US and Pakistani officials as saying that nothing from the vast US intelligence world - no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts,
no points on any satellite image - has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader.
"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, the Post quotes one of the officials as saying.
Intelligence officials have said that they believe bin Laden to be hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The CIA said it has sharply increased the number of officers and assets devoted to catch Laden after President George W Bush requested them to "flood the zone," the newspaper reported while quoting former and current counter-terrorism officials who point out how nobody was certain about where the "zone" was.
"Here you've got a guy who's gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly," the Post quoted T McCreary, a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, as saying.
"And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That's an extremely difficult problem," he added.
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