Pakistani defector was key in Bin Laden operation: Officials

ISLAMABAD, (AFP) - Two former senior Pakistani military officials told AFP 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.

The officials' accounts come after the publication of a controversial new report by US journalist Seymour Hersh in which he claims to have uncovered a secret deal between Washington and Islamabad that resulted in the killing of the terror chief in 2011.

The White House has flatly rejected Hersh's claims that Pakistan was told in advance about the May 2 Special Forces raid in the garrison town of Abbottabad, 110 kilometres (70 miles) north of the capital.

The operation sparked allegations Pakistani authorities had colluded with al-Qaeda, a claim denied by Islamabad.

A source -- who was a serving senior military official at the time of the raid -- told AFP this week that the defector was a "resourceful and energetic" mid-ranking intelligence officer whose efforts were critical to the operation's success.

Hersh's report quoted a senior US source as saying a "walk-in" approached the then-Islamabad station chief for the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2010 promising to lead them to bin Laden, who according to the journalist had been imprisoned by Pakistani authorities at the Abbottabad compound since 2006.

However, the Pakistani military source told AFP the defector had no knowledge his target was bin Laden but was instead given a task that would help verify the terror chief's identity.

The source declined to elaborate on what that task was, but a Pakistani investigation found that the CIA had run a fake vaccination programme with the help of physician Shakeel Afridi who obtained DNA samples.

On the defector's role, the source said: "This guy was inducted at a much later stage only to carry out the ground confirmation." He added that the defector did not belong to the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the country's main spy agency, but another branch, and was now residing in the United States.

Another former official, ex-ISI chief Hamid Gul, told AFP he was also aware of the defector.

"That is in my knowledge, that someone defected," he said. "There was too big a reward, he became a mole and agent to put in practice their plan." The US had placed a $25million-dollar bounty on information leading to the capture or killing of bin Laden -- a sum Washington has said it never paid because no human informants were used.

According to Hersh's report, the US learned that Pakistani authorities had bin Laden in their custody and were hoping to use him as a shield against al-Qaeda and Taliban attacks.

Later, Hersh reported, the US convinced Pakistan to stage a fake raid to kill bin Laden, providing a boost for US President Barack Obama -then in his first term -- while also allowing the Pakistanis to deny having anything to do with the killing.