South Asia News

Pakistan denies arresting officer for collaborating with US

Jun 15, 2011, 11:34 GMT

(FILE) File photograph dated 26 May 1998 shows Saudi dissident and Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. EPA/STR

Islamabad/Washington - The Pakistani military on Wednesday denied a New York Times report that an army officer was detained for assisting the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agency in locating Osama bin Laden before he was killed by US forces.

The New York Times on Wednesday quoted unnamed US officials saying a Pakistani Army major was among five local informants arrested. The officer was said to have copied license numbers of vehicles visiting bin Laden's compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad in the weeks before the May 2 raid.

In a statement, army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas 'strongly refuted' the report, saying 'There is no army officer detained and the story is false and totally baseless.'

The statement however did not deny the detention of other local informants.

The press report characterized the arrests as further evidence of the 'fractured relationship' between the US and Pakistan at a time when the administration of President Barack Obama is seeking to bolster its counterinsurgency operations in the South Asian country.

Deputy CIA director Michael Morell was quoted as telling a closed session of the US Senate Intelligence Committee last week that on a scale of one to 10, he rated Pakistan's cooperation at only three.

Analysts have said the raid on bin Laden was a blow to the Pakistani military's prestige. The embarrassment was partly due to the failure to detect the al-Qaeda leader - who had allegedly been living there for five years - and partly because the military raid was a violation of national sovereignty without the powerful institution's knowledge or approval.

The Times said Pakistan's military has been distancing itself from US intelligence and counterinsurgency operations in over the past several weeks. Relations were most recently chilled in January by the killing of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor in a street in Lahore.

The contractor, who claimed he acted in self-defence, was arrested but then released and repatriated after blood money was paid to the victims, provoking widespread protests.

The article also called into question the future of US drone attacks, whose strikes on suspected militant hideouts on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border have also met with popular opposition.

The Times quoted US officials as saying Pakistan's intelligence agency was increasingly unwilling to cooperate with surveillance for the CIA operations.

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