Pakistani doctor jailed for 33yrs for helping CIA to find Bin Laden

Shakil Afridi

A Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi who helped the CIA find Osama Bin Laden has been jailed for at least 30 years. Shakil Afridi was charged with treason for running a fake vaccination programme to gather information. The US secretary of state Hillary Clinton had called for his release on the grounds that his work served Pakistani and American interests. Bin Laden was killed by US forces in the north-western city of Abbottabad in May 2011. The killing triggered a rift between the US and Pakistan, whose government was seriously embarrassed to find Bin Laden had been living in Pakistan. Islamabad felt the covert US operation was a violation of its sovereignty. Shortly after the raid on Bin Laden's house, Dr Afridi was arrested for conspiring against the State of Pakistan. Pakistan has insisted that any country would have done the same if it found one of its citizens working for a foreign spy agency. Dr Afridi has been found guilty under the tribal justice system in Khyber district, and has also been fined $3,500. If he does not pay the fine his prison sentence will be extended by a further three years. Dr Afridi was not present in court so was unable to give his side of the story. The BBC's Aleem Maqbool in Islamabad says that many outside observers are concerned that most of the people detained since Bin Laden's killing have been those who were trying to help capture him, rather than those who helped shield him. It is not clear if Dr Afridi knew who the target of the investigation was when the CIA recruited him, or what DNA he managed to collect in the fake hepatitis B vaccination programme. The idea was to obtain a blood sample from one of the children living in the Abbottabad compound, so that DNA tests could determine whether or not they were relatives of Bin Laden, our correspondent says. US Defense secretary Leon Panetta confirmed in January that Dr Afridi collected samples for the US and he spoke to the CBS television programme "60 minutes" about the case. He said Dr Afridi "was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan... for them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I just think is a real mistake on their part". culled from BBC