Pakistan: Caught between US and a hard state

The Pakistan Army has strongly refuted US media reports claiming that a serving army major was among the five Pakistani informants arrested for assisting the CIA ahead of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. However, a military source conceded that around 40 suspects had been rounded up on charges of spying for the CIA.

It has been learnt that the name of the Army Major arrested by the Pakistani authorities is Amir Aziz, who in fact is a doctor in the army’s medical corps and lived just a couple of hundred yards from the compound where Osama was killed. Some officials said that Major Aziz was among several Pakistanis paid to keep track of and photograph those entering and leaving the compound, without being told whom they were looking for, the report said.

“Their families don’t have any idea where they have been taken,” said one neighbour in Abbottabad’s Bilal Town subdivision. “Nobody knows what they had done.”

A US official said that the CIA tried to get Major Aziz and other informants out of harm’s way before their arrests, offering to relocate them. A BBC report said that the CIA informants who were detained and then released by the ISI, have now gone missing. —inputs from agencies