What's new

Seized Phone Offers Clues to Bin Laden’s Pakistani Links

JayAtl

BANNED
Nov 18, 2010
8,812
-14
5,251
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/world/asia/24pakistan.html?_r=1&emc=na

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was recovered in the raid that killed both men in Pakistan last month, contained contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, senior American officials who have been briefed on the findings say.

The discovery indicates that Bin Laden used the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of his support network inside the country, the officials and others said. But it also raised tantalizing questions about whether the group and others like it helped shelter and support Bin Laden on behalf of Pakistan’s spy agency, given that it had mentored Harakat and allowed it to operate in Pakistan for at least 20 years, the officials and analysts said.

In tracing the calls on the cellphone, American analysts have determined that Harakat commanders had called Pakistani intelligence officials, the senior American officials said. One said they had met. The officials added that the contacts were not necessarily about Bin Laden and his protection and that there was no “smoking gun” showing that Pakistan’s spy agency had protected Bin Laden.

But the cellphone numbers provide one of the most intriguing leads yet in the hunt for the answer to an urgent and vexing question for Washington: How was it that Bin Laden was able to live comfortably for years in Abbottabad, a town dominated by the Pakistani military and only a three-hour drive from the Islamabad, the capital?

“It’s a serious lead,” said one American official, who has been briefed in broad terms on the cellphone analysis. “It’s an avenue we’re investigating.”

The revelation also provides a potentially critical piece of the puzzle about Bin Laden’s secret odyssey after he slipped away from American forces in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan nearly 10 years ago. It may help answer how and why Bin Laden or his protectors chose Abbottabad, where he was killed in a raid by a Navy Seals team on May 2.

Harakat has especially deep roots in the area around Abbottabad, and the network provided by the group would have enhanced Bin Laden’s ability to live and function in Pakistan, analysts familiar with the group said. Its leaders have strong ties with both Al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence, and they can roam widely because they are Pakistanis, something the foreigners who make up Al Qaeda’s ranks cannot do.

Even today, the group’s leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, long one of Bin Laden’s closest Pakistani associates, lives unbothered by Pakistani authorities on the outskirts of Islamabad.

The senior American officials did not name the commanders whose numbers were in the courier’s cellphone but said that the militants were in South Waziristan, where Al Qaeda and other groups had been based for years. Harakat’s network would have allowed Bin Laden to pass on instructions to Qaeda members there and in other parts of Pakistan’s tribal areas, to deliver messages and money or even to take care of personnel matters, analysts and officials said.

Wielding a Militant Tool

Harakat is one of a host of militant groups set up in the 1980s and early ’90s with the approval and assistance of Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to fight as proxies in Afghanistan, initially against the Soviets, or against India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Like many groups, it has splintered and renamed itself over the years, and because of their overlapping nature, other groups could have been involved in supporting Bin Laden, too, officials and analysts said. But Harakat, they said, has been a favored tool of the ISI.

Harakat “is one of the oldest and closest allies of Al Qaeda, and they are very, very close to the ISI,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and the author of “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad.”

“The question of ISI and Pakistani Army complicity in Bin Laden’s hide-out now hangs like a dark cloud over the entire relationship” between Pakistan and the United States, Mr. Riedel added.

Indeed, suspicions abound that the ISI or parts of it sought to hide Bin Laden, perhaps to keep him as an eventual bargaining chip, or to ensure that billions of dollars in American military aid would flow to Pakistan as long as Bin Laden was alive.

Both the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, said this month that they believed that some members of the ISI or the Pakistani Army, either retired or on active duty, were involved in harboring Bin Laden.

Bin Laden himself had a long history with the ISI, dating to the mujahedeen insurgency that the Americans and Pakistanis supported against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

( contd- click artcle link to read)
 
another cooked up drama with no merit or basis

How do you know that? Or are you just obfuscating and trolling? Why are you poluting the thread with "no value posts"? The report sounds completely credible. Bin Laden's couriers were communicating and dealing with some Pakistani network, that much is undeniable. That it was the Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen makes perfect sense for all the reasons given in the article. Why do you just dismiss it as a "drama" with no proof whatsoever to offer?? Don't you think that SOME Pakistani "miscreant" group was assisting the bin Laden couriers? It's depressing that a senior military professional has so little to add. How do YOU think that bin Laden's couriers were supported?
 
Harakat “is one of the oldest and closest allies of Al Qaeda, and they are very, very close to the ISI,”

Even today, the group’s leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, long one of Bin Laden’s closest Pakistani associates, lives unbothered by Pakistani authorities on the outskirts of Islamabad.


What I don't understand from the above statements is WHY?
 

Terror leader lives freely near Pakistani capital


AP, June 16, 2011

ISLAMABAD: On the outskirts of the Pakistani capital lives a militant considered so powerful that Osama bin Laden consulted with him before issuing a fatwa to attack American interests.

Fazle-ur-Rahman Khalil heads Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, a terrorist group closely aligned with al Qaeda and a signatory to bin Laden’s anti-US fatwa in 1998. Khalil has also dispatched fighters to India, Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya and Bosnia, was a confidante of bin Laden and hung out with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Pakistani authorities are clearly aware of Khalil’s whereabouts. But they leave him alone, just as they tolerate other Kashmiri militant groups nurtured by the military and its intelligence agency to use against India.

Khalil is also useful to the authorities because of his unusually wide contacts among Pakistan’s many militant groups, said a senior government official who is familiar with the security agencies and who spoke on condition he not be identified fearing repercussions.

Khalil’s presence in an Islamabad suburb, confirmed to The Associated Press by Western officials in the region, underscores accusations that Pakistan is still playing a double game – fighting some militant groups while tolerating or supporting others – even after the solo US raid that killed bin Laden on May 2.

Khalil’s Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, blamed for a deadly attack on the American Consulate in Karachi in 2002, has links to the Haqqanis and is considered a terrorist organisation by the US. Hundreds of militants are thought to belong to his organisation, though the strength of these groups is the links they share with each other, say analysts.

Khalil himself is not on any US wanted list. In the Islamabad suburb of Golra Sharif, he lives in a nondescript two-story compound that includes a seminary or religious school, hidden behind a traditional high wall protected by barbed wire.

Reached by the AP on his cell phone last month, Khalil dismissed suggestions that he may have been in touch with bin Laden while the al Qaeda leader was hiding in Abbottabad.

”It is 100 percent wrong, its rubbish,” Khalil said. ”Osama did not have contact with anybody.” The AP obtained Khalil’s phone number from a former aide who has since left the terror organisation.

The Pakistani senior government official who spoke with AP said Khalil has been arrested twice but each time was released on orders from Pakistan’s intelligence agency.

”He was significant for Osama bin Laden,” the official said. ”He has connections with all these groups in Waziristan but he is living here and we don’t go after him. He is the one you go to when you need to get to these groups,” tracking kidnap victims for example.

Khalil was once the boss of terror leader Ilyas Kashmiri, believed killed in a drone strike on June 3.

Like most of the militant groups that get a wink and a nod from Pakistan’s security agencies, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen’s primary focus is Kashmir, a picturesque region divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by each in its entirety. Kashmir has been the cause of two of three wars between the South Asian neighbors and brought them perilously close to a nuclear confrontation in 2000.

Khalil’s group has kidnapped foreigners in Indian Kashmir, killing one. His group also helped in the 1999 hijacking of an Indian airlines plane that resulted in the release of three militants, including Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who is now on death row for his part in the 2002 killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Khalil’s militant ties include the anti-Indian Lashkar-e-Taiba group, blamed for masterminding the November 2008 assault on Mumbai that killed 166 people. The AP learned from the same official that seven training camps are operating in Pakistani Kashmir and most of them are run by Jamaat-ud-Dawwa, the name Lashkar-e-Taiba took after being banned.

“There are seven jihadi camps working in Kashmir right now, giving them explosives training,” the official said. He said military and intelligence agencies say the camps provide Pakistan with “strategic depth.”

“They say we need them, otherwise India will treat us like the rest of South Asia, like they can dictate,” he said. “It is only the military and intelligence. The government has no say.”

Terror leader lives freely near Pakistani capital | | DAWN.COM
 
May 2 and events leading up to it are shrouded in mystery. I don't subscribe to a lot of the spicy stories coming out nowdays. The intention is to malign Pakistan's intelligence and armed services, and it will prove to be a failed strategy.

scape-goating Pakistan will also prove to be a failed strategy.
 
If it was true the americans n the world would have sanctioned us and god knows what............. this is just another rants based on fantasy just to malign Pakistan.


Get over it ..tches.
 
May 2 and events leading up to it are shrouded in mystery. I don't subscribe to a lot of the spicy stories coming out nowdays. The intention is to malign Pakistan's intelligence and armed services, and it will prove to be a failed strategy.

scape-goating Pakistan will also prove to be a failed strategy.

Do you think that the Government Pakistan will properly investigate who assisted bin Laden in Abbottabad and make the findings of its investigation public?
 
another cooked up drama with no merit or basis


You are on the right track but your description of it is a little off -- obviously, (NYT and the US intel community) the information presented and the "narrative" created is a result of not just a leak but a deep background brief - this means that it's part of a policy, a policy to create a public understanding, which in turn will beg the question "Well, what do we have to do to solve this problem?"

On the other hand, ordinary Pakistanis and the rest of the world deserve a exhaustive, factual investigation as to how it came to be that OBL was living in Abbottabad, who facilitated this and why - How it came to be that the so called "A bird does not flap it's wings that the ISI does not know of" is saying it was clueless? How is it that it's now that Islamist affiliations among officers and men of the Fauj are of concern to the Fauji brass ??

By playing defense, by choosing silence, the Pakistan state and armed forces have basically chosen to play the "acted upon" in it's relationships with the US and by refusing to come clean with the Pakistani people, the armed forces has allowed whatever credibility it had won, to be squandered - perhaps that credibility came it's way, too easy - it won't happen again.
 
Why the information is "leaked" after so many weeks after the capture of equipments from OBL compound?

Is it related to the troops withdrawal and start of blame games?
 
Harakat “is one of the oldest and closest allies of Al Qaeda, and they are very, very close to the ISI,”

Even today, the group’s leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, long one of Bin Laden’s closest Pakistani associates, lives unbothered by Pakistani authorities on the outskirts of Islamabad.


What I don't understand from the above statements is WHY?

Yes all this non-sense is made by propoganda of Pakistan enemies...like CIA, Mosad and Indian RAW
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Total: 1, Members: 0, Guests: 1)


Pakistan Defence Latest Posts

Back
Top Bottom