At the end of 2001, the U.S. military briefly had Osama bin-Laden cornered at Tora Bora in Eastern Afghanistan. He got away, and his whereabouts ever since have remained a mystery.
The U.S. government has long had a huge price on his head ($25 million), and every intelligence agent in the employ of the U.S. knows that he or she would be a legend for all time if their work could break this case.
But there has not been any effective hint of bin-Laden's whereabouts for the past seven-plus years. Which is precisely what makes today's news so intriguing.
Recently, scientists whose specialty has been how to pinpoint the movement of wild animals, especially endangered species, used several theories to come up with their hunch as to where bin Laden has been hiding since he fled from Tora Bora.
These scientists say they rely on "two principles used in geography to predict the distribution of wildlife, primarily for the purposes of designing approaches to conservation. The first, known as distance-decay theory, holds that as one travels farther away from a precise location with a specific composition of species — or, in this case, a specific composition of cultural and physical factors —the probability of finding spots with that same specific composition decreases exponentially."
In their study, published online today by the MIT International Review, the geographers report that "simple facts, publicly available satellite imagery and fundamental principles of geography place the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. in one of three buildings in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar, in the Kurram tribal region near the border with Afghanistan."
Read a summary of their report here.
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