A day after United States forces stormed Osama bin Laden?s mansion deep within Pakistan and killed the al Qaeda leader, authorities said it inconceivable that he didn’t have a support system in the Muslim nation.
“I think it’s inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time,” America?s counterterrorism chief John Brennan said at a press briefing.
When pressed further, he said, “I am not going to speculate about what type of support he might have had on an official basis inside of Pakistan.”
However he assured that they were talking with the Pakistanis on a regular basis and were going to pursue all leads to find out exactly what type of support system and benefactors that bin Laden might have had.
The world?s most sought after terrorist and responsible for the most devastating attack on U.S. soil, Osama bin Laden was killed after a precise operation on late Sunday night in a mansion in Abbottabad, just yards away from a military academy and 60 km north of Islamabad.
“There are a lot of people within the Pakistani government, and I’m not going to speculate about who or if any of them had fore-knowledge about bin Laden being in Abbottabad. But certainly his location there outside of the capital raises questions. We are talking to the Pakistanis about this,” he said.
Brennan once again reiterated that U.S. didn?t contact Pakistan authorities until after all of the forces and aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, however, in an opinion column in The Washington Post, tried to drive in the fact that it was ?a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden?.
But in a classified U.S. diplomatic cable leaked by whistleblowing website WikiLeaks last week, it was said that the despite being the world?s most wanted man, bin Laden was not exactly an invisible man in Pakistan.
The document said, ?In Pakistan, Osama bin Laden wasn’t an invisible man, and many knew his whereabouts in North Waziristan, but whenever security forces attempted a raid on his hideouts, the enemy received warning of their approach from sources in the security forces.”
Meanwhile, Chairman of the United States Senate Homeland Security panel Joe Lieberman too took on Pakistani administration for virtually sitting on the fact while bin Laden stayed safe and sound in a suspicious high security building in a town with Pakistani military instalments.