Shakil Afridi, a doctor who helped the CIA find the al-Qaeda chief, has been jailed for at least 30 years for treason by Pakistan
The Pakistani medical official who ran a fake CIA vaccination programme to help find Osama bin Laden has been jailed for 33 years.u00a0A spokesman for Khyber Agency, an administrative unit in Pakistan’s restless frontier, said Dr Shakil Afridi would face decades in jail — despite calls from senior US officials to release the man who helped with efforts to track down the al-Qaeda chief.
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Medical aid: Dr Shakil Afridi (inset) helped US officials confirm if Osama Bin Laden lived in Abbottabad by organising fake vaccination programmes. File pics
The tough sentence for the former surgeon general of Khyber will be taken as another sign of the terrible state of US-Pakistan relations.u00a0And it will further alarm western critics of Pakistan who say the country has put far more effort into trying to understand how US spies and special forces were able to plan and launch the Bin Laden raid than into how the al-Qaeda leader was able to remain for so long in the Pakistani army garrison town of Abbottabad.
The sentence was announced just days after US President Barack Obama snubbed Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, by refusing to hold a formal meeting with him at the Nato conference in Chicago.u00a0In January Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, said he was “very concerned” about the arrest of Afridi after Pakistan’s intelligence service discovered he had set up a fake hepatitisu00a0B vaccination scheme with his nurses going from house to house in Abbottabad in the weeks before the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout in May last year.
“For them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I just think it is a real mistake on their part,” Panetta said in January.u00a0There had been hopes that Afridi would eventually be quietly released after the controversy surroundingu00a0the Bin Laden raid had subsided.u00a0US intelligence officials say the clandestine operation by Afridi did not succeed in determining whether Bin Laden was in the house and the raid went ahead without any certainty that the Navy Seal team would find its target.
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