WASHINGTON: Pakistan’s main spy agency provided the US with a lead that helped them find and kill Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden, Prime Minister Imran Khan said Monday.
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Pakistan has until now officially denied having any knowledge of the terror chief until he was shot dead in a night time raid by US special forces on May 2, 2011, an incident that was a major national embarrassment and caused ties between the two countries to plummet.
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Khan, who is visiting Washington on his first official trip, made his claim in an interview with Fox News when he was asked whether his country would release a jailed doctor whose fake immunization drive helped the US track and kill the terror chief in 2011.
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“This is a very emotive issue, because Shakeel Afridi in Pakistan is considered a spy,” he told host Bret Baier, referring to the doctor.
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“We in Pakistan always felt that we were an ally of the US and if we had been given the information about Osama Bin Laden, we should have taken him out.”
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Baier then asked if Khan understood the skepticism around the Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for leaking key information, to which Khan replied:
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“And yet it was ISI that gave the information which led to the location of Osama Bin Laden.
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“If you ask CIA it was ISI which gave the initial location through the phone connection.”
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It was not immediately clear what Khan was referring to and he did not provide more detail.
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‘Governance implosion syndrome’
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Though Pakistan officially denies knowing that Bin Laden was living on its territory, Asad Durrani, a former spymaster, told Al Jazeera in 2015 that the ISI probably knew where he was hiding and hoped to use him as a bargaining chip before he was killed.
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The Al-Qaeda chief was tracked down after a 10-year manhunt to Abbottabad, a garrison town north of Islamabad where Pakistan’s military academy is headquartered, sparking allegations authorities were colluding with the terror group.
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A leaked Pakistani government report in 2013 said Bin Laden arrived in Pakistan in the spring or summer of 2002 – after the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan – and settled in Abbottabad in August 2005.
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The report, which coined the term “governance implosion syndrome” to explain the extent of official failures to detect him, said he was once stopped for speeding and enjoyed wearing a cowboy hat.
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Two former senior Pakistani military officials told AFP in 2015 that a defector from Pakistani intelligence assisted the US in its hunt for Osama bin Laden, but denied the two countries had officially worked together.
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AFP
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