Collective failures, incompetence and negligence by Pakistan allowed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to live in the country undetected for more than nine years, a leaked report says. The report by a Pakistani judicial commission also reveals new details about the US raid that killed bin Laden and intriguing details about his life on the run, including that he wore a cowboy hat to evade detection by US satellites. CIA spies tracked down bin Laden to the northwestern town of Abbottabad, where he was shot dead by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011 during the dramatic raid near Pakistan’s military academy. It was one of the most humiliating episodes in Pakistan’s history and exposed the country to allegations of incompetence or collusion with al-Qaeda to hide the world’s most wanted man. The government set up the judicial commission shortly after the raid to investigate after parliament demanded an independent inquiry. It interviewed senior civilian and military officials and bin Laden’s three widows before they were deported to Saudi Arabia. But its findings were kept secret until the Al-Jazeera news network published them on Monday. “Culpable negligence and incompetence at almost all levels of government can more or less be conclusively established by the testimonies of witnesses,” the report said. The commission said it had found nothing to support allegations of complicity but neither could it rule out the possibility of “plausibly deniable’ support” from current or former officials. The 336-page report included new information about bin Laden’s day-to-day life after he fled the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, arriving in Pakistan in the spring or summer of 2002. He stayed in Afghan border areas, the northwestern districts Swat and Haripur, and possibly other places before settling in Abbottabad in August 2005. The widow of one of two Pakistanis who provided his core support network said they including bin Laden were once all stopped for speeding in Swat. Her husband “very quickly settled the matter with the policeman and they drove on”, the report said without saying how. While in the mountainous region, bin Laden was said to have met Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, in February 2003. Muhammad was arrested by Pakistani authorities a month later. By 2005, the same year that bin Laden moved to Abbottabad, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) organisation closed its file on the hunt for the Al-Qaeda supremo. Foreign accusations that bin Laden was probably in Pakistan were not taken seriously.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 11:17:45 +0000
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