Doctor in bin Laden search now in prison
Suspected CIA operative pays price for aid to US
ISLAMABAD — Four years after U.S. forces shot dead Osama bin Laden at a house half a mile from Pakistan’s top military academy, the Pakistani doctor who allegedly ran a fake vaccination program for the CIA in an unsuccesful attempt to find the al-Qaida chief is serving a long prison term on questionable charges of aiding an insurgent Pakistani militant group, his attorney said.
Suspected CIA operative Shakil Afridi has paid a heavy price for the huge embarrassment caused to Pakistan’s powerful military and its security services by the discovery of bin Laden: On top of his 23year term, Afridi’s family lives in hiding and the lead attorney of his defense team was shot dead in March in the northern city of Peshawar.
His situation is in stark contrast to that of the two Pakistani militant groups that helped resettle bin Laden in Pakistan in 2002. Harakat-ul-Mujahideen and Jaish-i-Mohammed provided bin Laden with dedicated security teams as he moved around the north of the country before settling in Abbottabad in 2005, retired militants familiar with the operation said.
The security escorts were part of a Pakistanwide arrangement provided by the groups to al-Qaida and Afghan Taliban VIPs who were fleeing the American forces that invaded Afghanistan after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S., the former militants said.
The groups had taken turns operating a camp in Khost, eastern Afghani- stan.The two militant groups did not figure in the investigation that Pakistani security services undertook after U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden early in the morning of May 2, 2011. Despite being closely associated with al-Qaida since the 1990s, the two groups got a pass from senior intelligence operatives because they hadn’t participated in a decade-long insurgency by the Pakistani Taliban.
Afridi, the alleged CIA operative, had posed as a manager for the British charity Save the Children to gather DNA samples of children in the Abbottabad area while immunizing them against polio. The idea was to capture the DNA of the children in the bin Laden house so the CIA could look for a match with known members of the bin Laden family. The scheme didn’t work.
Afridi was taken into custody by Pakistani security operatives three weeks after bin Laden was killed, but wasn’t formally arrested until May 2012.
Rather than being charged by authorities in Peshawar, which would have entailed a trial under laws of evidence provided by Pakistan’s democratic constitution, Afridi was arrested in his native Khyber, one of seven tribal areas governed not by that constitution but by regulations introduced more than a century ago by British colonial rulers.
Afridi also was not charged with treason for allegedly working as a CIA operative, because it would have triggered a diplomatic row with the United States, his attorney said Friday. Rather, federal administrators in Khyber charged Afridi with financially supporting the locally dominant Lashkar-i-Islam militant faction and providing medical treatment to its fighters.
He was convicted and sentenced. His attorneys have sought a retrial on grounds that the convicting courts weren’t legally competent to pass sentence.
“Everything has been cooked up to implicate him — the security agencies felt Shakil had embarrassed them by leaking the secret whereabouts of Osama,” said Abdul-Latif Afridi, Afridi’s current lawyer, though no relation to him, and a former president of the Peshawar High Court Bar Association.