Zarqawi death won't weaken war, says Mullah Omar

KABUL, June 9 (Reuters) Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar vowed that the killing in Iraq of al Qaeda militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not weaken Muslim efforts against ''crusader forces'', a Pakistan-based news agency said today.

In one of the most significant developments in Iraq since the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Jordanian-born Zarqawi was killed on Wednesday in a US airstrike on a ''safe house'' north of Baghdad.

''I give good news to Muslims around the world, the resistance against the crusader forces in Afghanistan and other parts of the Islamic world will not be weakened,'' the Afghan Islamic Press cited Omar as saying in a statement.

The news agency did not say how it had obtained the purported statement from the fugitive Omar who, like al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, is believed to be hiding out somewhere along the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border.

Zarqawi's killing will inevitably focus attention on the hunt for bin Laden, nearly five years after the September 11 attacks on the United States and the subsequent overthrew of the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

The Taliban have been fighting US and other foreign troops and the Western-backed Afghan government ever since.

Bin Laden called Zarqawi, who was in his late 30s, the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq, and he came to symbolise the radical Islamist insurgency against US occupation.

Omar said he and ''all the brothers of the sacred resistance movement in Afghanistan'' expressed deep sorrow over the death.

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