Thursday, May 23, 2013

Pakistan

Doctor Who Helped Find Bin Laden Hideout Gets 33 Years

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Last updated (GMT/UTC): 23.05.2012 19:11

Pakistani authorities have sentenced a doctor charged with helping the United States find Al-Qaeda militant leader Osama bin Laden to 33 years in prison.

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, was charged with running a fake vaccination campaign in Abbotabad that helped identify bin Laden's hiding place in the northern Pakistan city.

Afridi, who was sacked as a government doctor two months ago, was found guilty under the justice system in Khyber district, part of Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal belt.

U.S. forces raided bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad and killed him in May last year.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on May 23 that Washington saw "no basis" for Pakistan to detain or charge Afridi.

And U.S. Senators Carl Levin and John McCain issued a joint statement calling Afridi's sentence "shocking and outrageous."

Based on reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP

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by: Anonymous

May 23, 2012 20:33

this verdict simply reflects that certain segments within the pakistani establishment clearly supported ben laden.

sorry to state...in some ways, pakistan is a failed state...don't really understand why the pakistani military is afraid of India...
punjabis against pashtuns, religious against non-religious, sunni against shia...pro-taliban against anti-taliban, pro-miltary against anti-military, pro-nepotism against anti-nepotism, pro-modernisation vs. anti-modernisation, pro-war vs. India against anti-war...pro-u.s. against anti-u.s., etc.
and the ominous atomic bomb in pakistani hands...

by the way, it's a very strange judiciary system that condemns a guy who helped to hunt down the leading figure of a global terrorist network...(even if the guy started to distance himself from certain attacks according to specific sources...rferl, inter alia...)
curious about the next years...
very nice prospects...pakistan is for probably more dangerous than Iran in terms of irrationality and looming wars, catastrophes, terrorism, nuclear war...