Pakistan was unaware of Osama’s presence in Abbottabad: Obama

NEW DELHI: Almost six years after infamous US raid on Pakistan soil that killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, former US president Barack Obama underlines that Pakistan was not aware of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

Addressing the second day of the 15th edition of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2017 in New Delhi, former president Obama said, "We had no evidence that Pakistani government was aware of Osama bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. We obviously looked at it," he said. In his remarks, Obama said the United States had no evidence that Pakistan had prior knowledge of Osama bin Laden’s presence in their territory. And the US looked into this fact at the time as well, he added.

“We had no evidence that the Pakistani government was aware of Osama bin Laden’s presence there but that is something obviously we looked at. I will leave it you to characterise beyond what I just said,” he said while responding to a question.

Obama said Pakistan has comparatively remained a better partner of the United States. “Pakistan has been a partner in many ways, it’s also true there are elements that have not been good partners with us,” said Obama. The world’s most wanted man, bin Laden had been killed in an operation conducted by US special forces in the garrison town of Abbottabad on May 2, 2011 in a mission codenamed ‘Operation Neptune Spear.’

Last month, the CIA released a vast archive of intimate Al-Qaeda documents, including Osama bin-Laden’s handwritten diary, seized in the deadly 2011 raid on his Pakistani compound. The huge trove includes images of diary pages left by the Saudi-born global extremist leader and a wedding video that includes the first public images of his son Hamza as an adult. The CIA put online 470,000 additional files seized in May 2011 when US Navy SEALs burst into the Abbottabad compound and shot dead the leader of al-Qaeda’s global extremist network. The US accused the al-Qaeda chief of perpetrating 9/11 attacks on New York that killed over 3000 people in 2001.