Pakistan’s powerful spy agency most likely sheltered Osama bin Laden and hoped to use the al-Qaeda chief as a bargaining chip with the US to strike a deal on Afghanistan before he was killed in a covert Navy SEALs raid in 2011, an ex-ISI chief has said. “I cannot say exactly what happened but my assessment…was it is quite possible that they (the ISI) did not know but it was more probable that they did. And the idea was that at the right time, his location would be revealed,” Lieutenant General (retd) Asad Durrani said.
Durrani said he doubted the official line given by Inter-Services Intelligence (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.
“And the right time would have been, when you can get the necessary quid pro quo — if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States,” he said.