President Bush said today he wanted Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to hand over members of Saudi-born exile Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization who may be hiding in Afghanistan.
"I would strongly urge the Taliban to turn over the al Qaeda organizers who hide in their country", Mr Bush told reporters as he met Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri in the Oval Office.
Mr Bush has said bin Laden, who is believed to be based in Afghanistan, is his prime suspect in the September 11th attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon that left nearly 6,000 people dead or missing.
Earlier today, the Taliban's leader said he was ready to hold talks with the United States on bin Laden, but the White House rejected the offer, saying it wanted action, not negotiations.
Mr Bush, who is meeting a series of foreign officials this week to argue for a sustained international effort to track down those behind the attacks, said the United States was gathering evidence to make its case.
"We're on the case," Bush said. "We're gathering as much evidence as we possibly can to be able to make our case to the world."
Earlier today Mullah Mohammad Omar, spiritual leader of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, told hundreds of Islamic clerics meeting today to deliberate the fate of Osama bin Laden that calls for his surrender were a pretext for the destruction of his state.
The reclusive leader appeared to be ruling out any swift handover of the Saudi-born multi-millionaire wanted as the prime suspect behind the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed nearly 6,000 people.
"Any evidence linking bin Laden to the attacks should be handed over to the Afghan Supreme Court or to clerics of three Islamic countries," Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted Mullah Omar as saying in a speech read out to a meeting of the clerics gathered in the presidential palace in Kabul.
"Our Islamic state is the true Islamic system in the world and for this reason ... the enemies our country look on us as a thorn in their eye and seek different excuses to finish it off," Omar was quoted as saying in the speech.
"Osama bin Laden is one of these (excuses)," he said of the man whom US President George W. Bush said is wanted "dead or alive."
It was unclear if the clerics really have the authority to decide to surrender bin Laden given the reverence that surrounds Omar, who may have convened the meeting more to endorse his own views than to seek consensus.