Islamabad, May 11: Former Pakistani President Parvez Musharraf has rejected a report that says his administration had given permission to the United States to carry out operations to arrest or kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
According to a report published in The British daily The Guardian on Tuesday, Musharraf and former US President George W. Bush had reached an agreement that allowed the US to take unilateral action against bin Laden.
And if such an attack occurred on Pakistani territory, it was agreed that Islamabad would publicly condemn the assault, the newspaper quoted US officials and retired Pakistani officials as saying.
Fawad Chaudhry, Musharraf’s spokesman, has rejected the report as “baseless,” insisting that “no such agreement had been reached during his (Musharraf’s) tenure.”
US President Barack Obama claimed that Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces on May 2 (May 1 Washington time) in a compound in Pakistan, resisting while unarmed. He added that the military mission was conducted without the knowledge of Pakistani authorities due to the United States’ mistrust of its purported ally.
The former Pakistani president also criticized his country’s intelligence agencies for their inability to discover the whereabouts of bin Laden.
Musharaf was the armed forces chief when he seized power in a 1999 coup but was forced to resign in 2008.
Musharraf was the president of Pakistan when bin Laden reportedly began residing near an army academy in Abbottabad, a town just 60 kilometers from the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
——–Agencies