Pakistan has said that it has found an unexploded US missile, proving violation of its airspace, and that it will complain to the UN Security Council.
The Foreign Ministry said the missile was found in an uninhabited area in the south-western province of Baluchistan, off the Arabian Sea from where US ships apparently launched Tomahawk cruise missiles last week at suspected guerrilla bases in eastern Afghanistan.
A US embassy spokesman in Islamabad said the embassy was looking into the report. This follows an embarrassing retraction of a report by Islamabad on Friday that one US missile had landed in a Pakistani border area, causing five or six casualties.
Britain's ambassador was yesterday asked to leave Sudan in protest at Prime Minister Tony Blair's outspoken support for the US strikes.
President Omar Hassan alBashir announced he was recalling Sudan's ambassador to Britain, Mr Omar Yousif Bireedo, and promised to open what is left of El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries to international inspection.
A senior figure in the Afghan Taliban movement said that the Islamic militant, Mr Osama Bin Laden, was a long way from the camps struck by US cruise missiles in Afghanistan last week.
"Osama was not even within a 500km (300-mile) radius," Mullah Jalauddin Haqqani told a Reuters reporter who returned yesterday from the Pakistan frontier.
Mr Haqqani, a minister in the Taliban administration, said on Saturday that Arab members of guerrilla groups abandoned their camps before the cruise missiles struck last Thursday, and that Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters took the heaviest casualties.
"All the Arabs were aware of a possible attack. There were only guards there when the cruise missiles hit their camp. Most of the people who died in the attack were Pakistanis or Kashmiris," he said.
The supreme Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, has ordered Mr Bin Laden to stop making threatening statements against the US following the missile strikes. According to an Afghan Islamic Press report yesterday, the Saudi dissident has agreed to obey.
But threats were still being made by others sympathetic to Mr Bin Laden's jihad or "holy war" against the US.
"We won't shut down these camps. We will allow more so that the Muslims should fight for their rights and against the gangsterism of America," Mr Haqqani said.
He said the Taliban, which controls 90 per cent of Afghanistan, will support all oppressed Muslims.
In Cairo yesterday, the Arab League urged the UN to send a team to Sudan to show that the factory bombed by the US did not produce chemical weapons components. The UN Security Council last night took no decision on a Sudanese request for a UN investigation to examine the factory. The lack of reaction came as the Us delegation expressed opposition to the fact-finding mission proposal and justified the missile strikes saying that the targeted group had links to 18 terrorist actions In recent years.