As America's attorney general warned of possible fresh attacks on America, senior US officials have said Afghanistan's Taliban must be ousted if it continued to support Saudi-born exile Osama bin Laden.
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Attorney General Mr John Ashcroft said he feared the risk of new attacks could increase as the United States retaliated for the aerial assaults on New York and Washington on September 11th, which left close to 6,000 people dead or missing.
"We believe there are substantial risks of terrorism still in the United States of America. As we as a nation respond to what has happened to us, those risks may, in fact, go up," Mr Ashcroft told CNN's Late Edition.
In an interview on the CBS program Face the Nation, Mr Ashcroft said potential attackers linked to the hijackers who targeted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon might be in America to unleash further devastation.
"We believe there is the likelihood of additional terrorist activity," Mr Ashcroft told CBS.
US officials, responding to a Taliban statement saying it had bin Laden in its control, repeated a US demand for the handover of Washington's chief suspect in the attacks.
White House Chief of Staff Mr Andrew Card said the United States wanted the Taliban ousted if it continued to support bin Laden and others associated with terrorism.
"We do not want any government to harbor terrorists. And the Taliban government has been harboring terrorists. We don't think that they are worthy of the leadership that America and the rest of the world demand," Mr Card said.
"They should be out of power" if they keep to these policies, Mr Card said. He said he hoped a stable government would replace the Taliban in Afghanistan.