... who is now among the dear departed, though not among the dearest...
was hiding and hoped to use him as a bargaining chip before he was killed by U.S. forces in 2011, a former spymaster has said.
Lieutenant General Asad Durrani, who led the country's Inter-Services Intelligence
...the Pak military
intelligenceagency that controls the military -- heads of ISI typically get promoted into the Chief of Army Staff position. It serves as a general command center for favored turban groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, tries to influence the politix of neighboring countries, and carries out a (usually) low-level war against India in Kashmir...
(ISI) agency from 1990 to 1992, made the comments while speaking on Al Jazeera's "Head to Head" interview show on Tuesday.
The al-Qaeda chief was tracked down after a 10-year manhunt to Abbottabad
... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden....
, a garrison town north of Islamabad where Pakistain's military academy is headquartered, sparking allegations authorities were colluding with the terror group.
A Pak-government appointed commission found nothing to support those claims, but also did not rule out the possibility of "'plausibly deniable' support" from current or former officials.
Asked whether it was possible for Bin Laden to have lived in the town without the powerful ISI's knowledge, Durrani said: "My assessment... was it is quite possible that they (the ISI) did not know, but it was more probable that they did.
"And the idea was that at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo -- if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States."
Durrani, who emphasised that he had no specific knowledge of the issue, suggested Pakistain may have been harbouring Bin Laden in the hope of getting a bigger say in the future of neighbouring Afghanistan, where U.S.-led forces officially ended a 13-year combat mission at the end of 2014.
"The quid pro quo to my mind... (was) you get your Osama bin Laden, provided that, now let's agree, let's agree on how to bring the Afghan problem to an end," Durrani told Al-Jazeera
... an Arab news network headquartered in Qatar, notorious for carrying al-Qaeda press releases. The name means the Peninsula,as in the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years it has settled in to become slightly less biased than MSNBC, in about the same category as BBC or CBS...
, according to a transcript released by the broadcaster.
Pakistain was one of three countries that officially recognised the Taliban government which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, and is often accused of continuing to provide covert support for their current insurgency.
A leaked Pak government report in 2013 said Bin Laden arrived in Pakistain in the spring or summer of 2002 -- after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan -- and settled in Abbottabad in August 2005.
The report, which coined the term "governance implosion syndrome" to explain the extent of official failures to detect him, said he was once stopped for speeding and enjoyed wearing a cowboy hat.
Bin Laden was shot and killed following a dramatic helicopter raid by U.S. special forces in the early hours of May 2, 2011.