The Taliban says Osama bin Laden is alive

The Taliban says Osama bin Laden is alive after the latest raids on Afghanistan.

The Taliban envoy to Pakistan says the first daylight raids had failed to find bin Laden.

Abdul Salam Zaeef also says the Taliban will not be handing him over. "He is alive, his health is very good, and he is in Afghanistan," the envoy said.

The raids did bring the first confirmed casualties of the bombing. Four Afghan workers for a UN affiliated mine-clearing agency were killed in an American air assault.

The United Nations appealed for the protection of civilians in Afghanistan as air strikes continued for the first time into the daylight hours. The Taliban stronghold of Kandahar was hit in mid-morning.

The attacks followed a second night of US air strikes around Kabul and in northern Afghanistan, where a rebel alliance has been fighting Taliban troops.

The daylight raid was a sign that the US command was confident that earlier Anglo-American attacks had diminished the Taliban's capability to defend itself from an aerial onslaught.

The United States has emphasised that it is not targeting civilians in the attacks.

The mine-clearing agency's office where the workers were killed last night was close to a Taliban radio transmission tower, a possible target of the raid.

The Taliban claim that dozens of people have been killed in the raids, and accused the United States of deliberately hitting civilian targets. There is no independent confirmation of the Taliban figures.

"In this freestyle game, Washington is aiming firstly to hunt the sitting Islamic Government in Afghanistan and then every committed Muslim in the name of terrorism," Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban envoy to Pakistan, told reporters in Islamabad.

Zaeef also said the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was safe in the wake of the latest air strikes.