The courier who led U.S. intelligence to
Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan hailed from the Swat Valley, a
one-time stronghold of militant Taliban fighters, Pakistani officials
said on Wednesday.
The officials identified the courier as
Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. He and his brother Abrar were shot dead in the
daring U.S. Navy SEAL raid May 2 that also killed bin Laden and two
other people.
The brothers apparently linked up with bin Laden
after they returned to Swat Valley from Kuwait, where their parents had
immigrated.
Swat is about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of the
city of Abbottabad, where bin Laden had been hiding for about five
years. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the real names of
the two brothers, said they were from the Swat village of Martung.
The
U.S. commando attack, conducted without notification of Pakistani
officials, was a huge embarrassment for the country given that bin
Laden's compound was in a military garrison city and only about 35
miles (60 kilometers) from the capital Islamabad.
Pakistan has
denied suspicions of involvement in sheltering bin Laden and set up an
independent commission to probe possible links and intelligence
failures. Among the challenges is trying to determine whether bin
Laden's support network spread beyond the brothers.
"I am sure he
could not have lived without a local network. He had to get messages
out. The kind of help that he needed to be there meant he had help from
somewhere, some groups maybe," a senior Pakistani intelligence official
said on Wednesday on the usual condition that his name not be used.
"Every
possible link is being looked into," he said. He flatly denied
involvement of the Pakistani intelligence agency known by its acronym
ISI. While the U.S. administration has publicly said there is no
evidence that anyone in a position of leadership harbored bin Laden,
they have not ruled out lower level assistance.
The CIA first
learned Ahmed's nom de guerre in 2002 from a detainee being held by
another country and wouldn't learn his real name until years later.
Ahmed,
who is said to be in his early 30s, was a protege of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the Sept. 11 mastermind, and a close associate of Faraj
al-Libi, a top al-Qaida operative captured in 2005 about 12 miles (20
kilometers) from Abbottabad.
Both Mohammed and al-Libi lied about
their association with Ahmed while being held in CIA secret prisons.
But a top al-Qaida operative named Hassan Ghul also in CIA custody
helped the agency connect the dots: Finding Ahmed, who had been
identified as someone important, could lead to bin Laden.
The
captives said the courier was known by the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed
al-Kuwaiti, which he adopted because their parents lived in Kuwait.
But
U.S. intelligence only found the courier last August, through a chance
interception of Ahmed's phone call. That set in motion the secret CIA
search of the Abbottabad region, culminating with the May 2 raid and
bin Laden's killing.
President Barack Obama's decision to keep
Pakistan in the dark about the raid, infuriated the military and its
intelligence agency. Relations sank to new lows.
The U.S.,
however, has warned it will do the same again if it has solid
intelligence on the whereabouts of any of five most-wanted figures.
Topping
that list is Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaida's No. 2. Others are: Libyan
Attiya Abdul Rahman, believed to be an operational chief; Pakistani
Illyas Kashmiri, on whom the U.S. place a $5 million bounty last month;
Sirajuddin Haqqani, the military chief of the Taliban-allied Haqqani
network and son of its leader Jalaluddin Haqqani; and the Taliban's
reclusive leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
The list was handed to
Pakistani authorities during a hurried visit last Friday by U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Joint Chiefs of Staff
Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen. They warned then that they would again go it
alone if they discovered the location of any of the five.
Pakistan's ISI made a slight overture to the CIA by allowing access to bin Laden's compound last week.
"It was a gesture to say let's start to patch things up," he said.
"We
don't want this relationship to end," he said, but another raid like
the one on May 2 "may be the straw that breaks the camel's back." AP
