ISLAMABAD — Seventeen local health workers have been fired for their part in a scheme that the CIA orchestrated in an effort to confirm that al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was hiding in a walled compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, a health official in that town said Wednesday.
The low-ranking health-department employees were punished for helping a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, undertake what turned out to be a fake vaccination campaign that the CIA hoped would obtain a DNA sample that would prove bin Laden’s presence in the compound. The effort apparently failed, but U.S. Navy SEALs raided the compound on May 2 anyway, killing bin Laden.
Pakistani authorities arrested Afridi shortly after the raid, and he remains the only Pakistani known to be in custody as a result of the bin Laden operation. No one has been detained for failing to detect bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and no Pakistani official has been dismissed for the military’s failure to detect the American raid until after U.S. helicopters had left Pakistan, carrying bin Laden’s body.
It was unlikely that any of the fired health workers knew the vaccination campaign was a CIA-orchestrated fake, but they were fired anyway for breaking the rules, said Zafeer Ahmed, the official in charge of health services for Abbottabad.
“There was negligence, as these workers did not have permission from the provincial government or the health department to work with Shakil Afridi,” Ahmed said. “I was ordered by the provincial government to take action against them.”
A provincial government inquiry into the affair is ongoing, and higher-ranking health officials could be disciplined in the future, he said.
McClatchy Newspapers revealed in July that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate had arrested Afridi for running the fake vaccination campaign on behalf of the CIA. His arrest has added to the breakdown in relations between Washington and Islamabad, with Americans pressing Pakistan to free him and allow him to travel to the U.S., where he would be resettled. To date, Pakistan has refused the U.S. request, and a commission investigating the bin Laden raid has suggested Afridi should be charged with treason for working for a foreign intelligence agency.
