A special U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) unit that had been hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants for 10 years has been closed, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts were reassigned within the CIA Counter-terrorist Center, intelligence officials were cited as saying.

The decision was a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit in 1996, when bin Laden's calls for global Jihad (Holy War) were a source of increasing concern for officials in Washington and before he became a household name.

The realignment reflects a view that al-Qaida is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, and a growing concern about al-Qaida-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the report said, quoting intelligence officials.

Agency officials told the newspaper that tracking bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority for the CIA, and the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened.

Instead, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals, the officials said.

However, Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official who was the first head of the unit, said the move would denigrate the agency's operations against al-Qaida.

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials.

An example of this shift, the report said, was shown when the Army's military counter-terrorism unit Delta Force was redirected from the hunt for bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. He was killed last month.

Source: Xinhua