"As far as SFOR (NATO-led Stabilization Force) is concerned there remains no firm evidence of any terrorist organisation either operating or training in this country," SFOR spokesman Mark Hope said.

A statement came a day after Yossef Bodansky, director of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the US Congress, told the Glas Srpske daily that terrorists responsible for the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad last year were trained near the central Bosnian town of Zenica.

"We cannot ignore such statements, but also we should not accept them as an obvious truth," Bosnian Foreign Minister Mladen Ivanic said at the press briefing.

Ivanic added that Bosnian authorities should investigate statements that link the country with terrorist organizations such as bin Laden's Al-Qaeda.

Some 7,000 NATO peacekeepers are still deployed in Bosnia under peace accords which ended the country's 1992-95 war, during which hundreds of foreign so-called mujahedeen, or holy warriors, fought alongside Bosnian Muslim forces.

Foreign Muslim fighters were ordered to leave Bosnia under the 1995 peace accords, but some of them stayed and obtained citizenship either on the basis of their army service or by marrying local women.

Bodansky said bin Laden was actively directing terrorist cells in Bosnia which had been responsible for a series of suicide attacks in Iraq last year.

"There is a terrorist network in Bosnia, composed of several well-trained and connected groups, which are directly or indirectly (linked) to ... Osama Bin Laden," he was quoted as saying in the Serbian-language paper.

"The network in Bosnia ... is training and controlling terrorists who later travel to Western European countries."