Thaindian News

London, May 3(ANI): British politicians and experts have said that it beggared belief that no one in Pakistan’s notorious intelligence service had any idea that elusive Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was living in a vast, custom-built compound only 800 yards from the country’s military academy.

The Saudi-born terrorist, who had evaded capture for a decade, was killed in a top secret operation involving a small team of US Special Forces in Abbottabad city, located 50 kilometres northeast of Islamabad and 150 kilometres east of Peshawar on Sunday night.

Former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell said that someone in the Pakistani authorities must have known that Bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad.

“I find it astonishing to believe that this building, this compound could have existed within a stone’s throw of a major military garrison without someone knowing at some level,” the Daily Mail quoted Sir Campbell, as saying.

“How did they get food and water? What happened if anyone went to buy oil? You can’t live, as it were, in total seclusion,” he pointed out, adding, “Somewhere, at some level, someone in the authorities must have known about this.”

“It’s interesting, of course, the ISI [Pakistani security service] operates at different levels, and in the past there have been allegations that the ISI have had sympathetic attitudes towards Al Qaeda,” he stated.

Tory MP Rory Stewart, a former diplomat, said that it was ‘absolutely unbelievable’ that Bin Laden had been able to live undetected in a town like Abbottabad.

“Abbottabad is a town that I know a little bit and it’s a relatively normal middle-class town… not very far from a lot of the central bits of Pakistan, when everyone was expecting him to be in a mud fort hidden up on the edge of the Afghan border,” he said.

One analyst at Chatham House in London said that if the Pakistani security forces were found to have colluded with Al Qaeda, the repercussions could be devastating for international relations.

“It would effectively take a bad relationship and make it worse,” said Gareth Price, a senior research fellow on the international affairs think-tank’s Asia Programme.

‘People have so far managed to work around a bad relationship, but there must be questions of how bad the relationship can be. If it is true that no one knew he (Bin Laden) was there, then maybe things can carry on as they were… The question which will be asked now is who knew about it,” Price noted, adding that if it transpires that Bin Laden’s presence was more widely known, relationships with Pakistan could ‘break down entirely’.

According to the report, Tony Blair said that there would be a ‘whole stack of questions’ in the aftermath of Bin Laden’s death.

“I’m not in a position to answer those questions at the moment,’ he said. ‘I do think we should remember there are some 30,000 Pakistani civilians and 5,000 members of Pakistani security forces who have also died as a result of this campaign of terror that Osama Bin Laden represented. They have died too in these last years,” he said.

“I hope very much that what this operation represents is a concerted co-operation between the United States and its allies and Pakistani military and intelligence,” he added.

Pakistan has repeatedly denied having any links to Al Qaeda, and reacted furiously when British Prime Minister David Cameron accused it of ‘looking both ways’ on terrorism last year. It also rejected US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claim last May that some government officials there were harbouring Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar, the report said.

Officials believe Mullah Omar’s whereabouts is also probably well known to some elements of the Pakistani regime, it added. (ANI)