Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, said he didn’t know Osama bin Laden was hiding in the town where U.S. forces killed him in May and doesn’t think the country’s intelligence service had protected the al-Qaeda leader.
“I am very sure of one thing — that I didn’t know, whether one believes it or not,” said Musharraf, who took power in a bloodless coup in 1999. He remained Pakistan’s army chief of staff until about a year before he was forced to resign as president in August 2008.
Speculation that the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a branch of the Army, aided bin Laden doesn’t make sense and couldn’t have been hidden from him, Musharraf said Thursday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
“I am from the army. They are my people,” said Musharraf, who lives in London but plans to return to Pakistan next year and run for president again in 2013. “I think there was no complicity. There was negligence of the highest order.”
The U.S. is scouring evidence seized in the May 2 raid on bin Laden’s compound to determine whether any Pakistani military or intelligence officers helped protect him for the five years he appeared to have lived in the compound in Abbottabad. Bloomberg News
