Washington, May 09: Osama Bin Laden had a ‘support network’ in Pakistan that may have involved figures ‘inside of government’, Barack Obama said yesterday.
The U.S. president’s claim will increase the pressure on Pakistan over having harboured the world’s most wanted man for years.
Pakistani officials have so far strenuously denied the country had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s hideout. Yesterday, the U.S. further justified its killing of the Al Qaeda leader eight days ago, saying that evidence seized from his lair in Abbottabad showed it was an ‘active command and control centre’.
Pakistani authorities reacted with outrage to the latest claims, with a senior intelligence official describing the assertion that Bin Laden was actively planning terrorism from his hideout as ‘bull****’ and ‘ridiculous’, and others denying the country knowingly offered a base to extremists.
Last night there were two loud explosions in the vicinity of the hideout, located just half a mile from Pakistan’s military training academy. The source of the blasts were not immediately clear but there had been speculation that authorities might demolish the compound to try to stop the intense media attention on it.
The developments came as Defence Secretary Liam Fox announced he is to visit the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command next week to hold top-level talks about how to prevent an Al Qaeda attack on British soil in revenge for Bin Laden’s assassination. He warned that Al Qaeda ‘still poses a threat to the UK’ and other Western countries, adding the material found in Bin Laden’s hideout showed the terror network was ‘still alive and well’.
He also signalled that Britain will discuss the possibility of new anti-terrorist raids in Yemen, before plots hatched there can come to fruition.
Dr Fox said: ‘We have to keep up our guard in a lot of places. It is not as if we are saying, “Let’s look for trouble”. Trouble is out there. We either have to deal with it at the point of origin or it is very likely to come and deal with us.
‘We will have to be very vigilant, including in Afghanistan, to ensure that the threat doesn’t come back and Afghanistan is once again used as a space by those terrorists to launch the sort of attacks we saw on 9/11.’
In an interview recorded with U.S. TV show 60 Minutes, Mr Obama said: ‘We think that there had to be some sort of support network for Bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don’t know who or what that support network was.
‘We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that’s something that we have to investigate and, more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.’
A U.S. intelligence official had earlier stressed that the ‘treasure trove’ of computer files and other material seized from the terrorist leader’s compound showed he was still playing a key role in Al Qaeda despite having been on the run for almost ten years.
The official said: ‘This compound in Abbottabad was an active command and control centre for Al Qaeda’s top leader and it’s clear that he was not just a strategic thinker for the group.’
Pakistani officials have announced an inquiry into Bin Laden’s residence in the nation’s heartland but evidence that he had long felt safe in Pakistan was mounting at the weekend.
He was already believed to have laid low in Abbottabad for five years.
But now one of his widows, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, has told the Pakistani investigators holding her in custody that he had previously stayed in the nearby village of Chak Shah Mohammad, population 400, for two and a half years, while his large compound was being built.
–Agencies–