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directing his far-flung network from his compound in Abbottabad where he was killed on May 2.
Washington said on Saturday that, based on a trove of documents and computer equipment seized in the raid, bin Laden’s hideout north of Islamabad was an “active command and control centre” for al Qaeda where he was involved in plotting future attacks on the United States.
“It sounds ridiculous,” said a senior intelligence official. “It doesn’t sound like he was running a terror network.”
Pakistan, heavily dependent on billions of dollars in US aid, is under intense pressure to explain how the al Qaeda leader could have spent so many years undetected just a few hours’ drive from its intelligence headquarters in the capital.
Suspicion has deepened that Pakistan’s pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups, may have had ties with bin Laden – or that at least some of its agents did.
The agency has been described as a state within a state.
Pakistan has dismissed such suggestions and says it has paid the highest price in human life and money supporting the US war on militancy launched after bin Laden’s followers staged the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on America.
The Obama administration has seen no evidence Pakistan’s government knew bin Laden was living in that country before his killing, the US national security adviser said yesterday.
Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is scheduled to “take the nation into confidence” in parliament today, his first statement to the people more than a week after the incident embarrassed the country.
Pakistani officials said the fact that there was no internet connection or even phone line into the compound where the world’s most-wanted man was hiding raised doubts about his centrality to al Qaeda.
Analysts have long maintained that, years before bin Laden’s death, al Qaeda had fragmented into a decentralised group that operated tactically without him.
“It’s bullshit,” said a senior Pakistani security official, when quizzed on a US intelligence official’s assertion that bin Laden had been “active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions” of the Islamist militant group from his secret home in the town of Abbottabad. – Reuters.