Pressure mounts on Pakistan's military over bin Laden
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ISLAMABAD |
(Reuters) - Pakistan's opposition leader accused the powerful spy agency of negligence and incompetence on Wednesday as the country's former president said rogue members of the security establishment may have helped Osama bin Laden hide for years near Islamabad.
Ratcheting up pressure on the country's military as it fights off suspicion that it sheltered the al Qaeda leader, rival India named five Pakistani army officers in a list of 50 criminals it wants extradited to stand trial on terror charges.
Nawaz Sharif, who heads Pakistan's largest opposition group, rejected a government decision to put an army general in charge of the inquiry into intelligence lapses that led to the killing of bin Laden in a helicopter raid by U.S. commandos on May 2.
Sparing the government and its leaders in his tirade over the surprise breach of Pakistan's sovereignty by American forces, Sharif said is the "worst case of negligence and incompetence" by the country's security agencies.
"It is matter of serious concern that our security institutions knew nothing when the helicopter gunships and commandos remained in our territory and airspace for so long," he told a news conference, calling for a judicial commission to lead the investigation to dispel doubts about its objectivity.
Sharif also demanded how it was that the world's most wanted man could be holed up in a compound less than a kilometer from the country's main military academy, and bemoaned the damage that the incident had caused to Pakistan's reputation abroad.
"Isn't it true that world considers us as a country that abets and exports terrorism?" he said. "Isn't it true that all crimes everywhere in the world have links with our home?"
ROGUE OFFICERS MIGHT HAVE KNOWN
Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, an army general who seized power in 1999 and now lives in exile in London, told the ABC News network that there was a possibility that rogue junior officers in the country's intelligence and military might have been aware of bin Laden's whereabouts for years.
"It's really appalling that he was there and nobody knew," he said. "But rogue element within is a possibility. The possibility ... (is that there was), at the lower level, somebody following a policy of his own and violating the policy from above."
The country's pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has a long history of contacts with Islamist militants.
Pakistan rejects allegations that it was either incompetent in tracking down the man behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States or complicit in hiding him in the town of Abbottabad just 50 km (30 miles) from Islamabad.
"We wouldn't be naive enough to be complicit in this affair. We would be risking not only the future of our country, but also the future of our children," a senior security official said, adding that if there was a support network protecting bin Laden it did not come from within the security establishment.
KERRY HEADS TO PAKISTAN TO SOOTHE FURY
America's secret raid on bin Laden's compound has embarrassed and enraged Pakistan's military and has added to strains between Washington and Islamabad that were already running high.
The security official said the Navy SEALs operation had left the army and the ISI "discredited in the eyes of the public".
"We are very angry about this breach of trust," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The space for cooperating with the Americans on military and intelligence operations has been shrunk because of this incident."
Pakistani cooperation is crucial for Washington's efforts to combat Islamist militants and bring stability to Afghanistan, and the U.S. administration's decision on Tuesday to send Senator John Kerry to Islamabad suggests it is keen to contain the fallout.
Kerry, a Democrat who is close to the Obama administration, is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Co-author of a 2009 bill that tripled non-military aid to Islamabad, he is seen as a friend of Pakistan.
Nevertheless, U.S. lawmakers are questioning whether Pakistan is serious about fighting militants in the region, and some have called for a suspension of American aid to Islamabad.
INDIA'S "MOST-WANTED"
Compounding the pressure on the army on Wednesday, India for the first time directly accused a handful of serving Pakistani military officers of being involved with militancy. New Delhi's list of its 50 "most-wanted" criminals was handed to Islamabad in March, but its contents have only just been released.
New Delhi has long accused its arch-rival of harboring militants such as those behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people, who it says were supported by the ISI.
Militant factions, including al Qaeda, have vowed revenge for the killing of al Qaeda chief.
In what may be the first such demonstration of that, on Wednesday two men on a motorbike threw a couple of hand grenades at the Saudi Arabian consulate in the Pakistani city of Karachi. No one was hurt, police said.
Al Qaeda is violently opposed to the Saudi government but Karachi police said it was too early to say if the attack was linked to the death of the Saudi-born militant chief.
The United States is hoping to question the three wives of bin Laden who were left in the Abbottabad compound after the U.S. raid and are being detained, although Pakistani officials played down the possibility of any speedy access.
U.S. investigators, who have been sifting through a huge stash of material seized during the operation, believe the wives could help them trace bin Laden's movements and his network.
ABC News quoted Pakistani officials as saying that they were interested in studying the remains of a U.S. helicopter that crashed during the raid, which experts believe was a version of the Blackhawk modified with stealth features.
One official told the network that China, an ally of Pakistan, was interested in examining the remains of the helicopter and another said "We might let them take a look".
But Pakistani military officials dismissed the report saying there was no intention to give the wreckage to China, nor had China asked to see it.
"Someone's aiming to spread alarm," one official said.
(Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Robert Birsel) (source:reuters.com)
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