Osama bin Laden was able to live in Pakistan undetected for nine years because of a breathtaking scale of negligence and incompetence, a leaked report said.
The 336-page official Pakistani government report was published by a TV channel yesterday, and written by a commission tasked with investigating the circumstances surrounding the covert US raid that killed bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011.
The pan-Arab Al-Jazeera satellite channel published the report on its website after it was leaked to the station by unknown sources. Pakistani officials did not respond to requests for comment on the report’s authenticity.
The US Navy SEALs raid that killed the al Qaida founder in the town of Abbottabad outraged Pakistani officials because they were not told about it beforehand.
US officials have said they kept Pakistan in the dark because they were worried that bin Laden would be tipped off.
The fact that the compound where bin Laden was hiding was located only about half a mile from Pakistan's equivalent of West Point led many in the US to suspect Pakistani officials of aiding him, although Washington never found evidence to back that up.
The report said it also found no evidence that current or former Pakistani officials helped bin Laden hide, although it could not rule it out completely.
It said very little is known about the network of support that bin Laden enjoyed in Pakistan, other than the group of family and backers that lived with him in Abbottabad.
The report attacked all levels of government, including the powerful army and intelligence services, for failing to detect the terror leader as he lived in six different places in Pakistan over nine years.
“To summarise, negligence and incompetence to a greater or lesser degree at almost all levels of government are clear,” said the report, which was based on testimony from more than 200 witnesses, official documents and site visits.
The criticism of the army and intelligence services was noteworthy in a country where officials often steer clear of taking these powerful organizations to task.
The commission recommended the government make the report public for fear it would be ignored or suppressed, but that never happened, even though it was completed months ago.
The report said it was shocking that nobody in the Pakistani government discovered bin Laden while he was living in Abbottabad for six years.
He was in a compound described as “hardly normal,” because it was isolated from homes around it, had very high walls and was protected by barbed wire.
Bin Laden wore a cowboy hat when he moved around the compound to avoid detection from above.
“The extent of incompetence, to put it mildly, was astounding, if not unbelievable,” the report said.
It said the al Qaeda chief came close to capture in 2002 or 2003 when he was living in the north-west Swat Valley, according to the wife of bin Laden’s courier, Maryam.
A policeman pulled them over for speeding as they were on their way to a bazaar, but Maryam’s husband, Ibrahim al-Kuwaiti, quickly settled the matter before the officer recognised bin Laden, she said.
The commission, composed of a Supreme Court judge, a retired army officer, a retired police officer and a career diplomat, took officials to task for failing to uncover the CIA network assumed to have helped the US discover bin Laden.
“This has been a case of nothing less than a collective and sustained dereliction of duty by the political, military and intelligence leadership of the country,” the report said.
AP