Under fire, Pakistan's PM to address nation on Osama bin Laden death

Opposition parties took aim at Pakistan's leaders on Monday over the killing of Osama bin Laden, compounding pressure from Washington over the al-Qaeda leader's hideout, as the prime minister prepared to "take the nation into confidence" on the crisis in a parliament address.

Pakistan's main opposition party is stepping up calls for the prime minister and president to resign over the breach of  sovereignty by US forces who slipped in from Afghanistan to storm the compound where bin Laden was holed up.

"We want resignations, not half-baked explanations," an official of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League told the News daily.

Pakistan welcomed the death of bin Laden, who plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, airliner attacks on the United States, as a step in the fight against militancy but also said the US raid to kill him was a violation of its sovereignty.

Pakistan has also been embarrassed by the killing of bin Laden by US special forces who found him hiding in a high-walled compound in Abbottabad town, 50km (30 miles) north of the capital.

Former cricket star Imran Khan, who leads a small but strident nationalist party, weighed in on President Asif Ali Zardari and the unpopular government of Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani for "policies based on lies and propaganda".

Khan said in a commentary that Western allies were "pointing accusatory fingers at us as harbourer of terrorists", though the United States has stopped short of accusing Pakistan of providing shelter to the world's most-wanted man.

US President Barack Obama said on Sunday that bin Laden likely had "some sort" of a support network inside Pakistan, but added it would take investigations by Pakistan and the United States to find out just what the nature of that support was.

The discovery of the world's most wanted man living a short distance form Pakistan's main military academy has led to accusations of either incompetence on the part of its intelligence service, or complicity in sheltering him.

"We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don''t know who or what that support network was," Obama said.

"We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate," he added.

The government's opponents at home are outraged more about humiliation of an unannounced swoop by helicopter foreign forces inside Pakistan than they are about the possibility that establishment insiders knew where bin Laden was hiding.

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 the al Qaeda leader - or that some of its agents did.

Talat Masood, a retired general and defence analyst, said that if there was official collusion to keep bin Laden secure it was most likely provided at a local level.

"I feel definitely there were influential people who were protecting him," he told Reuters. "I believe there was real ignorance at the highest level but there was collusion at the local level."

Obama said the Pakistani government had "indicated they have a profound interest in finding out what kinds of support networks bin Laden might have had".

Gilani, who will make his first statement to the country when parliament sits at 1200 GMT, has blamed only a "global intelligence failure" over bin Laden's evasion of capture for nearly a decade since the September 11 attacks.

Pakistan''s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, told ABC's "This Week" programme his government would act on the results of the investigation.

"And heads will roll, once the investigation has been completed. Now, if those heads are rolled on account of incompetence, we will share that information with you. And if, God forbid, somebody''s complicity is discovered, there will be zero tolerance for that, as well."

The ambassador said Pakistan had "many jihadi has-beens from the 1980s who are still alive and well and kicking, and some of them could have been helping them, but they are not in the state or government of Pakistan today."

Pakistan promoted a Muslim holy war, or jihad, against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.                                                                                   

Pakistani security officials reacted with skepticism to a US assertion that bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network from Abbottabad compound.

Washington has said that, based on a trove of information that would fill a small college library seized in the raid, bin Laden's hide-out was an "active command and control center" for al Qaeda where he was involved in plotting attacks on the United States.

Pakistani officials said the fact that there was no Internet connection or even telephone line into the compound where the world's most-wanted man was hiding raised doubts about his centrality to al-Qaeda.

"It sounds ridiculous," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. "It doesn't sound like he was running a terror network."

Analysts have long maintained that, years before bin Laden's death, al-Qaeda had fragmented into a decentralised group that operated tactically without him.