Al-Qaida chief's location in Abbottabad was established with help from Shakil Afridi, says US defence secretary Leon Panetta
A senior US official has admitted that a Pakistani doctor played a key role in tracking Osama bin Laden to his hideout in northern Pakistan and called for his release from jail.
The comments by US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, were the first public confirmation of a part of the Bin Laden operation revealed by the Guardian in July last year, which detailed how the CIA used Dr Shakil Afridi to establish whether the al-Qaida leader was living in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Afridi has been in Pakistani custody since the country's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) discovered the secret task performed by the doctor, who set up a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad in a bid to gain DNA samples from those staying at the suspect compound.
The CIA was never certain that Bin Laden was present in the house. Afridi worked for the intelligence agency in the weeks leading up to the US special forces raid on 2 May, setting up a scheme that supposedly involved going house-to-house to vaccinate residents in Abbottabad.
Panetta, speaking to the US television network CBS in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday night, also voiced his belief that elements within Pakistan must have known that Bin Laden, or at least someone significant, was present inside the compound.
"I am very concerned about what the Pakistanis did with this individual [Afridi]. This was an individual who, in fact, helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regard to this operation," he said.
The Guardian investigation discovered that Afridi was arrested in late May and was subsequently tortured. It is believed that he remains in ISI custody but has not been charged formally with any crime. The fate of the doctor has become another source of tension between Islamabad and Washington, with American officials pressing Pakistan to free him so he and his family can be resettled in the US.
Pakistan's official commission investigating Bin Laden's presence in the country last year recommended that Afridi be tried for treason. The military, which will decide what ultimately happens to Afridi, was furious that the CIA was recruiting Pakistani citizens for clandestine operations inside the country, and officials point out privately that it is a crime to work for a foreign intelligence agency.
The doctor has turned into a bargaining chip within the failing US-Pakistan alliance. It is believed that Pakistan might be prepared to let him go after public attention to the case wanes and it extracts something in return from the US.
"He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan. He was not in any way doing anything that would have undermined Pakistan," said Panetta.
"Pakistan and the US have a common cause here against terrorism," he continued. "And for them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I just think it is a real mistake on their part."
The US defence secretary, who was in charge of the CIA at the time of the Bin Laden raid, also said that while there was no actual evidence of Pakistani complicity in the al-Qaida leader's presence in Pakistan, suspicions must have been raised about his hideout.
"I personally have always felt that somebody must have had some sense of what – what was happening at this compound. Don't forget, this compound had 18ft walls … It was the largest compound in the area," said Panetta.
"So you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question: 'What the hell's going on there?'"