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- Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh claims bin Laden was a prisoner of ISI since 2006.
Veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed that Osama bin Laden was a prisoner of Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006, and that a Pakistani intelligence officer gave him up to the US in return for a $25 million reward.
Writing in the London Review of Books on the fourth anniversary of the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden, Hersh claimed that the then Pakistan army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and head of ISI, Lt General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of the US Navy Seals’ raid and made sure that the two helicopters carrying the Seals to Abbottabad crossed Pakistani airspace without triggering an alarm.
Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, home to the Pakistan Military Academy, on the night of May 2, 2011, in a CIA-led operation conducted by Seal Team Six of the US Navy.
Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting after he broke the story on the My Lai massacre in 1969 during the Vietnam War. His reports in 2004 on the US military’s ill-treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq also drew global attention.
As per the official US version, bin Laden’s location at Abbottabad was identified by the CIA by tracking an al-Qaeda courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Hersh, however, claims that a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer betrayed the secret of bin Laden’s presence at Abbottabad in return for the $25 million reward offered by the US.
In August 2010, this Pakistani intelligence officer, who has since been relocated with his family to Washington and is a consultant to the CIA, walked into the office of the CIA Station Chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. Allowing the CIA Station Chief, Jonathan Bank, to be named in a criminal suit for murder which led to him being moved out of Pakistan soon after was part of an elaborate cover-up of its complicity by the ISI, according to Hersh.
ALSO READ: White House calls Seymour Hersh’s article on bin Laden ‘outright falsehood’
The walk-in, Hersh claims, had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains, and that “the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him.”
Bin Laden was very ill, and that early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move near his compound to provide treatment. Aziz was also given a part of the $25 million reward because he got the DNA sample which conclusively proved that it was bin Laden in Abbottabad.
Hersh claims that Saudi Arabia had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the ISI. While he agrees that US President Barack Obama did order the raid, he claims that many other aspects of the US government’s account are false. Hersh also says that bin Laden was never buried at sea, as claimed by Obama, and some of his body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains by the Seals as they returned to to Jalalabad in Afghanistan. -
