Washington, January 29 : Defence secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged publicly for the first time that a Pakistani doctor provided key information to the US in advance of the successful Navy SEAL assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound last May.
Panetta told CBS’s 60 Minutes, in a programme to be broadcast tomorrow, that Shakil Afridi helped provide intelligence for the raid on Osama’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Afridi ran a vaccination programme for the CIA to collect DNA and verify Osama’s presence in the compound. He has since been charged by Pakistan with treason. Panetta said he is “very concerned” for the doctor.
“I’m very concerned about what the Pakistanis did with this individual…who in fact helped provide intelligence that was very helpful in the operation,” Panetta said.
“He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan… Pakistan and the US have a common cause here against terrorism… and for them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I think is a real mistake on their part,” the defence secretary said.
Panetta also told 60 Minutes that he remains convinced that someone in the Pakistani government “must have had some sense” that a person of interest was in the compound. The defence secretary added that he has no proof that Pakistan knew it was Osama.
“I personally have always felt that somebody must have had some sense of what was happening at this compound. Don’t forget this compound had 18-foot walls… It was the largest compound in the area. So you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question, ‘What the hell is going on there?’,” Panetta told 60 Minutes.
Pakistan was not aware of the US raid on the compound, Panetta said as he explained: “We had seen some military helicopters actually going over this compound. And for that reason it concerned us that, if we, in fact brought (Pakistan) into it, that they might… give Osama a heads up”.
When asked whether he knows for sure that the government of Pakistan knew where Osama was, Panetta said: “I don’t have any hard evidence, so I cannot say it for a fact. There’s nothing that proves the case. But as I said my personal view is that somebody somewhere probably had that knowledge.”
Nearly nine months after the Osama raid, Panetta said the Islamist terror group is still “a real threat to the US”.
“And clearly we are confronting al Qaida in Pakistan. We’re confronting the nodes of al Qaida in Yemen, Somalia, north Africa and obviously al Qaida links are involved in Afghanistan,” he added.