London,May 07: Afghan intelligence had told Islamabad nearly four years back that the most hunted Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was hiding in an area near Abbottabad, but nothing was done about it as the claim was rejected by then president Pervez Musharraf, a former top spy has said.
Osama bin Laden was shot dead by US commandos who stormed his hideout in Abbottabad city May 2.
Afghanistan’s former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh told the Guardian newspaper in Kabul that the National Directorate of Security (NDS) sleuths had come to the conclusion as early as in 2004 that the world’s most wanted man must be inside Pakistan and not in semi-autonomous tribal areas.
The former spy master said they believed Osama must be within Pakistan due to thousands of interrogation reports and the logical assumption that Osama, who was a millionaire with “no background of toughness”, would not be living in a tent.
“I was pretty sure he was in the settled areas of Pakistan because in 2005 it was still very easy to infiltrate the tribal areas, and we had massive numbers of informants there,” he was qouted as saying.
-Agencies