Pakistan's president on Tuesday denied suggestions that his government may have sheltered Osama bin Laden, but admitted his security forces were left out of a US raid to kill the al-Qaeda chief.
Pakistan's president on Tuesday denied suggestions that his government may have sheltered Osama bin Laden but admitted his security forces were left out of a US raid to kill the al-Qaeda chief.
US officials kept Pakistani authorities in the dark out of concern that they might "alert the targets" and jeopardize the special forces assault on Monday that ended a long manhunt for bin Laden, CIA Director Leon Panetta told Time magazine.
The revelation that bin Laden had holed up in a luxury compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, possibly for five to six years, prompted many U.S. lawmakers to demand a review of the billions of dollars in aid Washington gives to nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, issuing his first response to questions about how the world's most-wanted militant was able to live for so long in comfort and undetected near Islamabad, did little to dispel suspicions.
"Some in the US press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing," Zardari wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post. "Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn't reflect fact."
It was the first substantive public comment by any Pakistani leader on the airborne raid by US forces on bin Laden's compound that brought to an end a long manhunt for the al Qaeda chief who had become the face of Islamic militancy.
Pakistan has faced enormous international scrutiny since bin Laden was killed, with questions over whether its military and intelligence agencies were too incompetent to catch him, or knew all along where he was hiding and even whether they had been complicit.
Reflecting US-Pakistani relations strained by years of mistrust, Islamabad was kept in the dark about the raid until after all US aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.
Pakistan denied any prior knowledge of the US raid that killed bin Laden, but said it had been sharing information about the targeted compound with the CIA since 2009.
While Islamabad hailed the killing of bin Laden as an important milestone in the fight against terrorism, Pakistan's foreign ministry said it had expressed "deep concerns" that the operation was carried out without informing it in advance.
"He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone," Zardari wrote, without offering further defense against accusations his security services should have known where bin Laden was hiding.
"Although the events of Sunday were not a joint operation, a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilized world."
Facing pressure to produce absolute confirmation of bin Laden's demise, White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said the United States was considering whether to release photographs and video taken during the raid as proof that bin Laden had died in the raid.
The Afghan Taliban on Tuesday challenged the truth of bin Laden's death, saying Washington had not provided "acceptable evidence to back up their claim" that he had been killed. They also said aides to bin Laden had not confirmed or denied his death.
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