Islamabad, September 10: Nawaz Sharif, a two-time former prime minister of Pakistan and current head of one of the country’s major political parties, has met with Osama bin Laden on numerous occasions, and it was in fact the al Qaeda leader who developed the relationship between Sharif and the Saudi royal family, says a former Pakistani intelligence official.
According to the Times of India, “bin Laden introduced Nawaz Sharif to the Saudi royal family in the late 1980s and during a meeting the former premier had asked the al Qaeda chief to provide employment to Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia.”
The claim was made by Khalid Khawaja, a former member of Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency. In a follow-up article published in the Times of India Wednesday, Khawaja adds that Sharif and bin Laden have met five times so far.
Sharif, who heads the Pakistani Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party, denies the allegation, calling it “meaningless.”
For his part, Khawaja, the former ISI agent, says he has himself met with bin Laden more than 100 times, but “not after the 9/11 incident.”
Sharif served as prime minister of Pakistan twice, from 1990 to 1993, and again from 1997 to 1999, when he was overthrown in a military coup. It was during Sharif’s second term that Pakistan launched live tests of nuclear bombs, in reaction to India’s earlier tests.
In 2007, ABC News reported that Sharif “once received a million-dollar payoff from Osama Bin Laden as a thanks for not cracking down on the militant tribal areas in Pakistan’s northwest border province, according to a former member of bin Laden’s inner circle.”
Some historians have claimed for some time that there has been a link between Sharif and bin Laden. In their book, Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark claim that in 1989 Sharif plotted with bin Laden and others to assassinate then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Bhutto, who was assassinated in December, 2007, was seen as being among the most pro-Western of Pakistan’s politicians. No link between bin Laden, or the ISI, or Sharif, has been officially made in Bhutto’s killing. The UN launched a formal investigation into the assassination in July of this year.
–Agencies