New Delhi: Pakistan's former ISI chief Asad Durrani has publicly said that his country knew about Osama bin Laden's whereabouts before the U.S. raid that killed him in May 2011.
Durrani's reveled this during an interview for Al Jazeera's program “Head to Head.” The full interview is set to air this April.
Lieutenant General Asad Durrani told Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan that he doubted the official line given by Pakistan's intelligence services, the ISI, that it was unaware of the al-Qaeda leader's whereabouts until his death, implying that Pakistan would only have exchanged knowledge of his location in a quid-pro-quo deal.
Duranni also speculated that bin Laden's whereabouts were revealed to U.S. intelligence agents in exchange for an accord on “how to bring the Afghan problem to an end.” It's not clear what such an agreement might have contained.
The interviewer asked Durrani whether the Abbottabad complex where bin Laden lived and was ultimately killed was a safe house run by Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani spy agency. He responded, “If ISI was doing that, then I would say they were doing a good job. And if they revealed his location, they again probably did what was required to be done.”
According to the US, the raid on Bin Laden's compound was deliberately conducted without the knowledge of the Pakistani government or it's military.
The ISI had previously helped the CIA detain a number of high-ranking suspects, including Ramzi Yousef, one of the men who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Durrani served as director-general of ISI from 1990-92 and then as Pakistan's ambassador in Germany and Saudi Arabia, finishing his diplomatic work in 2002.
The full Al Jazeera interview with Durrani will air in April 2015 as part of the fourth series of Head to Head, Mehdi Hasan's interview shows.
