Osama Bin Laden was killed in a secret raid by a US Navy SEAL team in Pakistan on May 2, 2011. (File)
New Delhi:
United States failed to notify Pakistan of Osama bin Laden’s location due to lack of confidence and past experiences of terrorists being briefed after information sharing with Islamabad, former secretary said American in Defense and former CIA chief Leon Panetta.
Panetta, in an interview with WION TV, also said he found it “hard to believe” that there was no one in Pakistan who knew about Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.
Osama bin Laden, the world‘s most wanted terrorist and then al-Qaeda leader, was killed in a secret raid by a US Navy SEAL team on his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan on May 2 2011.
“When we found out the location of this complex in Pakistan, it was located in a place called Abbottabad. Abbottabad is a center for their intelligence services and Pakistan West Point is also located there,” Panetta said.
The US Military Academy is located at West Point in New York.
This complex was three times the size of the other compounds, it had 18-foot walls on one side and 12-foot walls on the other with barbed wire around it, said Panetta, who was the director of Central. Intelligence Agency (CIA) when the raid was carried out.
“I find it very hard to believe that there was no one in Pakistan who knew about this complex,” he said.
Once the United States found the complex, they had to decide if they would share this information with Pakistan and President Barack Obama made the decision considering that when information was shared with Pakistan on the whereabouts of the terrorists, they were warned and suddenly were able to disappear, Panetta said.
“Due to this worry and lack of confidence, quite frankly, we decided not to inform the Pakistanis of Bin Laden’s location and we did not inform them of the operation we carried out because we were worried that if we did, bin Laden would probably be asked to move, ”he said.
“So thanks to what we did, I think we were able to be successful in the mission to hunt down bin Laden,” said Panetta.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
