Islamabad - Two former senior Pakistani military officials told AFP Tuesday that a defector from Pakistani intelligence assisted the US in its hunt for Osama bin Laden but denied the two countries had officially worked together.
The officials' accounts come after the publication of a controversial new report by US journalist Seymour Hersh in which he claims to have uncovered a secret deal between Washington and Islamabad that resulted in the killing of the terror chief in 2011.
The White House has flatly rejected Hersh's claims that Pakistan was told in advance about the May 2 Special Forces raid in the garrison town of Abbottabad, 110 kilometres (70 miles) north of the capital.
The operation sparked allegations Pakistani authorities had colluded with Al-Qaeda, a claim denied by Islamabad.
A source -- who was a serving senior military official at the time of the raid -- told AFP on Tuesday that the defector was a "resourceful and energetic" mid-ranking intelligence officer whose efforts were critical to the operation's success.
Hersh's report quoted a senior US source as saying a "walk-in" approached the then-Islamabad station chief for the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2010 promising to lead them to bin Laden, who according to the journalist had been imprisoned by Pakistani authorities at the Abbottabad compound since 2006.
However, the Pakistani military source told AFP the defector had no knowledge his target was bin Laden but was instead given a task that would help verify the terror chief's identity.
The source declined to elaborate on what that task was, but a Pakistani investigation found that the CIA had run a fake vaccination programme with the help of physician Shakeel Afridi who obtained DNA samples.
AFP
