Bush rejects Taliban bin Laden offer

US President George Bush sternly rejected a Taliban offer to discuss handing over terror suspect Osama bin Laden to a third country as US jets began a second week of bombing.

‘‘They must have not heard. There’s no negotiations,’’ the US President said.

Meanwhile the number of people in the United States exposed to anthrax grew to 12 with the addition of a police officer and two lab technicians in New York.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson declared that attempts to transmit the deadly bacteria through the post ‘‘is an act of terrorism."

However, officials said they still did not have evidence linking the anthrax outbreaks in Florida and New York the terrorists believed responsible for the September 11 suicide hijacking attacks on New York and Washington.

‘‘We should consider this potential that it is linked,’’ Attorney General John Ashcroft said. ‘‘It is premature at this time to decide whether there is a direct link.’’

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice sought to quell fears that the terrorists may have crude nuclear weapons.

A defence official said last week that if the terrorists had obtained any nuclear material, they might be able to make a weapon that could spread radiation without an actual destructive explosion.

‘‘We have no credible evidence at this point of a specific threat of that kind,’’ Ms Rice said.

Ashcroft said investigators were seeking to question about 190 people who may have knowledge of terrorism.

Secretary of State Colin Powell left for a high-priority diplomatic mission to Pakistan and India aimed at keeping tensions between those nations from further complicating the military campaign in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Returning to the White House after a weekend at the Camp David retreat, President Bush reiterated four clear conditions the Taliban must meet before bombing would be stopped.

‘‘All they have got to do is turn him (bin Laden) over, and his colleagues and the thugs he hides, as well as destroy his camps and (release) the innocent people being held hostage in Afghanistan,’’ President Bush said yesterday.

The latter was an apparent reference to eight foreign aid workers imprisoned in Afghanistan. The administration had avoided calling them ‘‘hostages’’.

In his speech to a joint session of Congress on September 20, the US President said they had been ‘‘unjustly imprisoned’’.

A White House spokeswoman said she believed it was the first time Bush had publicly used the word hostage.

President Bush said there would be no negotiations even as a Taliban leader suggested the Afghan Government would be willing to discuss surrendering bin Laden to a third country if the United States provided evidence of his guilt and stopped bombing.

‘‘There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt,’’ President Bush said. ‘‘We know he’s guilty.’’

Overseas, a US military official said the bombing of Afghanistan had entered a ‘‘clean-up mode’’.

US warplanes have destroyed nearly all of the targets originally assigned to them, including militant training camps and weapons storage areas, the captain of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier said.

The new strikes destroyed Kabul’s international telephone exchange, severing one of the last means of communication with the outside world.

President Bush ignored a question about whether he wanted to install a new government if the Taliban fell. Ms Rice sought to strike a delicate balance on the issue.

‘‘America cannot choose the future government of Afghanistan. Only the Afghan people can choose the future government of Afghanistan,’’ she said. But, she added, ‘‘we have no reason to leave an Afghanistan that its neighbours have to fear for instability’’.

Earlier yesterday, a spokesman for the Taliban Embassy in Pakistan said that sending bin Laden to the United States for a trial would be ‘‘a joke’’ and that it was a mistake for US officials to focus narrowly on him when other terrorists were in a position to strike.

Mr Ashcroft dismissed the statement as propaganda, and addressed a fresh round of terrorist threats against Americans and world leaders by bin Laden supporters.

On the legal front, Mr Ashcroft asked Americans to remain vigilant for signs of another terrorist attack as ‘‘a preparedness, not a paralysis, not a panic’’.

Mr Thompson raised the possibility that the anthrax was being spread by a domestic source.

‘‘It could be somebody holding a grudge’’, or ‘‘a copycat kind of situation’’, he said. Mr Thompson also sought to reassure Americans the government was strengthening its response against any bioterrorist threats.