Islamabad - Pakistan on Monday rejected as "politicking" a United States official's weekend claim that Osama bin Laden was close to being captured.
"He can say this, but we have no sound information. This is a political statement," Rashid said.
The US state department official in charge of counter-terrorism affairs, Joseph Cofer Black, told local Geo television on Saturday that the forces pursuing the al-Qaeda chief had gotten closer to him in the past two months.
"If he has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking. He will be caught," Black said in the television interview.
'This is a political statement'
"What I tell people, I would be surprised but not necessarily shocked if we wake up tomorrow and he's been caught along with all his lieutenants. That can happen because of the programme and infrastructure in place."
Rashid however said no new information had come to light, despite a rash of high-profile al-Qaeda arrests which began mid-July.
"I think there is no confirmed information about him. We have no knowledge. Maybe Black has. We exchange our information but we have no new information," the minister said.
"There has been no change in the information since then."
Bin Laden is believed to be hiding on one side of the mountainous 2nbsp;450km frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where conservative Pashtun tribes hostile to the United States are sympathetic to Islamic extremists.
He was last known to be in the Tora Bora mountains on the Afghan side of the border in December 2001, where US-led forces staged one of their final offensives in the campaign to topple the five-year Taliban regime. - Sapa-AFP