KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A man claiming to be the Taliban spokesman that Afghan authorities said they have captured called The Associated Press on Thursday to deny it.
"I've not been arrested,'' the spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the AP, disputing an Interior Ministry statement that he had been captured in southern Helmand province on Wednesday.
"I don't know if they arrested some innocent villager with the same name,'' he said, adding the government often claims to have killed or arrested Taliban leaders in reports later found to be false.
Ahmadi, who is one of the most public voices for the fundamentalist insurgency, called an AP reporter with whom he has frequent phone contact. The reporter recognized the voice as Ahmadi's.
The Interior Ministry said Ahmadi was taken into custody with his brother during a police operation Wednesday in the village of Sufiyan in Helmand -- a province wracked by some of the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan that has claimed more than 4,400 lives this year.
The Helmand provincial police chief confirmed that someone with Ahmadi's name had been arrested, but admitted it was possible that the captive just shared the Taliban spokesman's name.
"We have arrested Qari Yousef and his brother from a house yesterday, but I don't know which Qari Yousef it was or how many there are,'' said Helmand provincial police chief Mohammad Hussein Andiwal.
Another Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, had also contacted another AP reporter to dispute the Interior Ministry report, saying Ahmadi was free.
The Interior Ministry spokesman could not immediately be reached for further comment.
Ahmadi is the first person many journalists contact for Taliban comment on violence and kidnappings in Afghanistan.
As the Taliban has stepped up its insurgency against foreign troops and the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai in the past several years, it has made increasingly sophisticated efforts to communicate with the media.
But it remains virtually impossible to confirm the identity of Taliban spokesmen because they do not appear in public and communicate only by phone or text message. Nor is it possible to establish their location and exact ties to the militia's leadership.
Journalists say there are at least four Taliban militants claiming to be Ahmadi. Two AP reporters who have interviewed him several times said they have spoken with different men with different voices who have claimed to be Ahmadi. The AP did not use those comments.
Recently there have been two Taliban spokesmen -- Ahmadi, who covers southern Afghanistan, and Mujahid, who speaks on the militia's activities in the north and east.
Two other spokesmen have been arrested in the past two years and were swiftly replaced.
On Jan. 15, Afghan agents arrested Taliban spokesman Mohammad Hanif in eastern Nangarhar province near the border with Pakistan.
Afghanistan's intelligence service later distributed a video of what it said was Hanif, 26, being questioned and claiming that Pakistani intelligence was helping to hide Taliban leader Mullah Omar inside Pakistan _ a charge denied by Pakistan.
A predecessor of Hanif, Mullah Hakim Latifi, was arrested in 2005 by Pakistani police in southwestern Baluchistan province.
