France orders probe into bin Laden death report leak

PARIS, (Reuters) - France’s Defence Ministry said on Saturday it could not confirm a newspaper report quoting French secret services as saying al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had died but would launch an inquiry into the leak of secret papers.

The Defence Ministry issued the statement after the French regional newspaper L’Est Republicain said Saudi Arabia was convinced bin Laden had died of typhoid in Pakistan last month.

“The information published this morning in the L’Est Republicain newspaper relating to the supposed death of Osama bin Laden cannot be confirmed,” the Defence Ministry said.

“The Defence Minister (Michele Alliot-Marie) has asked that an inquiry be carried out to determine the origin of the leak that can be punished by criminal charges.”

A U.S. intelligence official told Reuters the report should be treated with caution and a senior Pakistan government official said Islamabad had not received any information from any foreign government that would corroborate the story.

The Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry spokesman was not available for comment and a Western diplomat in Riyadh said the diplomatic community had no such information.

“If anyone was in the picture, I doubt it would be Saudi intelligence. Even if Saudi Arabia had information, they’d pass it on to the United States, not France. It doesn’t ring true,” the diplomat said.

Asharq Alawsat runs this Reuters piece. One of the problems with intelligence (in all sences of the word) is that one needs to be able to tell the difference between fiction and fact. Usually, there are dozens of rumors or not-quite-right data points for each fact and it’s not always easy to tell them apart. This report lists a few things that move this “intelligence” toward the “rumor” category, including a citation of Bin Laden’s supposed kidney problems. That’s an issue that has generally been dismissed by analysts, but keeps resurfacing from time to time.

UPDATE 09/24/06: Asharq Alawsat runs an Associated Press article today that pretty much dismisses the earlier reports.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington offered this statement saying it could not confirm the reports. Ambassador Turki Al-Faisal, who headed Saudi intelligence for 24 years, is certainly in a position to get accurate information about such reports.]