The Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA track Osama bin Laden to his compound in the town of Abbottabad has been barred from leaving the country.
The official Pakistani commission investigating the al-Qaeda leader’s presence in the country announced on Tuesday that Shakil Afridi and others it wanted to question are banned from going abroad without its permission. This is a blow to Washington’s efforts to get Afridi freed from Pakistani custody and give him sanctuary in the US.
The Guardian revealed in July that, before bin Laden’s death in May, Afridi had set up a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad in the hope of being able to obtain DNA samples from the house where the al-Qaeda chief was suspected of living.
The CIA was never sure of bin Laden’s presence in the Abbottabad house, even when the decision was made to launch a unilateral US special forces operation to raid the compound on May 2.
The doctor had been recruited by the CIA for an elaborate scheme to vaccinate residents for hepatitis B, a ploy to get a DNA sample from those living in the house to see if they were bin Laden family members.
Pakistani and American officials are at loggerheads over the fate of Afridi: Washington sees him as a hero, while Islamabad says that he committed a serious crime by working for a foreign intelligence agency. The commission’s latest decision will be helpful to the Pakistani authorities in resisting US demands to free Afridi.
The issue of Afridi is entangled in Pakistan’s anger over the operation to kill bin Laden, which was undertaken without its knowledge, and the Pakistani military’s fears that the CIA has established an extensive spy network in the country using Pakistani citizens.
Afridi was arrested by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency three weeks after the bin Laden operation, on the outskirts of Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan. He has not been charged with any crime. His real job was working as a government health official, in charge of a part of the tribal area that borders Afghanistan. He has been held ever since. Washington wants to give Afridi and his wife and children a new life in the US.
Pakistan felt humiliated by the bin Laden operation: not only was the al-Qaeda leader living comfortably in a picturesque garrison town, but a US special forces squad was able to enter its territory by helicopter and kill him before Pakistan’s defense forces were alerted.
The government named a five-member commission of inquiry in June, headed by a supreme court judge, “mandated to ascertain the full facts regarding the presence of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.”
“Abbottabad Commission has imposed a ban on traveling abroad for all persons related to Abbottabad incident including Dr Shakil Afridi till further orders,” the commission said in a statement.
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