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Pakistani security officials reacted with skepticism on Sunday to a US assertion that Osama bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network from his compound in Abbottabad, where he was killed on May 2. Washington said Saturday that, based on a trove of documents and computer equipment seized in the raid, Bin Laden's hideout north of Islamabad was an "active command and control center" for Al Qaeda where he was involved in plotting future attacks on the US. "It sounds ridiculous," said a senior intelligence official. "It doesn't sound like he was running a terror network." Pakistan said on Sunday that government officials were still holding three of Bin Laden's wives and eight of his children, the AP reported. One of Bin Laden's widows told investigators that Bin Laden and his family had spent five years in Abbottabad. Pakistan is under intense pressure to explain how the Al Qaeda leader could have spent so many years undetected just a few hours' drive from its intelligence headquarters in the capital. Suspicion has deepened that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency may have had ties with Bin Laden – or that at least some of its agents did. Pakistan has dismissed such suggestions and says it has paid the highest price in human life and money supporting the US war on militancy launched after Bin Laden's followers staged the 9/11 attacks on the US. The Obama administration has seen no evidence Pakistan's government knew Bin Laden was living in that country before his killing, the US National Security Adviser, Tom Donilon, said on Sunday. However, Donilon said Pakistani officials needed to provide US authorities with intelligence they had gathered from the compound where Bin Laden was killed, and access to Bin Laden's three wives who are in Pakistani custody. US President Barack Obama also said in an interview shown on Sunday that Bin Laden had a "support network" in Pakistan, but it is not clear if the Pakistani government was involved. Pakistani officials said the fact that there was no Internet connection or even phone line into the compound where the world's most-wanted man was hiding raised doubts about his centrality to Al Qaeda. Analysts have long maintained that, years before Bin Laden's death, Al Qaeda had fragmented into a decentralized group that operated tactically without him. On Saturday, the White House released five video clips of Bin Laden taken from the compound, most of them showing the Al Qaeda leader, his beard dyed black, evidently rehearsing the videotaped speeches he sometimes distributed to his followers. None of the videos was released with sound. A US intelligence official said it had been removed because the US did not want to transmit Bin Laden's propaganda. But he said they contained the usual criticism of the US as well as capitalism. Agencies |
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