(Updates with Negroponte quote)

By Simon Gardner

KABUL, Sept 11 (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is not hiding in Afghanistan, the insurgency-racked country's foreign minister said on Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

"I know that he is not in Afghanistan, but I don't have information where he is," Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta told Reuters in an interview.

"Our intelligence information and activities of al Qaeda ... and also the information of Afghans in the anti-terror war all give ... information that he is not in Afghanistan," he said. The Taliban, the country's former rulers, sheltered bin Laden and his al Qaeda network prior to their overthrow in late 2001.

U.S.-led forces have been searching for bin Laden since they toppled the Taliban government after it refused to hand him over. U.S. officials believe the world's most wanted man is hiding in the mountainous, inaccessible area straddling the Afghan-Pakistani border.

"(Given) the enmity between him and the Afghan population ... because he was the main creator of a terrorist and dictatorship regime against the population of Afghanistan, it is impossible that he can find support among the civilians of Afghanistan," Spanta added.

"That is the main reason that I believe that he is not here," he added, saying bin Laden's capture was "not important" compared to the wider goal of destroying the international terrorist network active in the region.

Separately, a senior U.S. official said Washington believes bin Laden is somewhere along Afghanistan's shared border with Pakistan.

"Our best assessment is he's still alive and that he's somewhere in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told reporters on a visit to Kabul on Tuesday. "Wherever he is, he is hiding."

Spanta's comments came ahead of the release of a new bin Laden videotape on Tuesday, the second in a week to coincide with the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks he masterminded, in which he praised the 19 men who carried them out.

Last week bin Laden issued a video saying the United States was vulnerable and had to embrace Islam to avert war, a message some analysts interpreted as a possible call for new attacks.

Spanta said he would like to see closer cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan to stamp out the resurgent Taliban, who are resorting increasingly to suicide bombings against Afghan and western troops.

The United Nations on Sunday said Afghanistan was on course for a record number of suicide bombings in 2007, with many bombers Afghan nationals recruited from madrasas in neighbouring Pakistan. Suicide attacks killed 305 people in Afghanistan in 2006.

"I wish more cooperation, and I think we are in the right direction," Spanta said, adding he would also encourage fellow Muslim countries to play an active role in providing security and helping with reconstruction.

More than 7,000 people have been killed since early 2006 in a spree of near-daily confrontations between Taliban and Afghan and foreign troops, ambushes and suicide blasts.

(Additional reporting by Sayed Salahuddin in KABUL)

AlertNet news is provided by